Key facts
- Kommersant reported demand for foreign data center capacity, particularly in Kazakhstan, rose noticeably over the past month.
- Yevgeny Svidersky, vice president of cloud services at ITGlobal.com, told Kommersant that demand for foreign capacity had risen noticeably.
- Available cloud resources in Russia's domestic data center market are nearly 90% occupied, according to Kommersant.
- Putin's November 2 decree lets authorities requisition the reserved 10% of private data center capacity within 24 hours.
- Yandex and Sberbank are both major players in Russia's AI development, and the state plays a central role in the sector.
Russian companies are increasingly seeking capacity at data centers abroad, especially over the past month, the Russian state-controlled outlet Kommersant reported on November 10. Demand for foreign data center capacity, particularly for facilities in Kazakhstan, has risen noticeably, Yevgeny Svidersky, vice president of cloud services at ITGlobal.com, told Kommersant.
Some Russian companies have already begun migrating services abroad, while others are seeking foreign data centers solely to back up their existing infrastructure, Kommersant reported. The shift follows an exchange of strikes on data centers by Russia and Ukraine.
On September 23, a Russian attack damaged a Kyiv data center housing network equipment for internet provider UTELS, causing service disruptions. The attack also affected cloud service Fex.net and disrupted internet access for about 100,000 households in Kyiv. Since then, Russia has increasingly targeted Ukraine's digital infrastructure, Kommersant reported.
Between October 8 and October 18, Ukrainian drones struck three Yandex data centers, a Sberbank facility under construction and a data center belonging to social media platform VK. The attacks prompted Russian authorities to consider additional protection measures, including underground data centers.
Kommersant reported that the consequences of Ukraine's strikes on Russian data centers could extend beyond disrupted banking and online services, potentially setting back the country's AI development and affecting military technology. Yandex and Sberbank are both major players in Russia's AI development, while the state plays a central role in the sector.