Nearly a third of Russia's announced data center projects have stalled, and the Ministry of Digital Development is now in early-stage consultations on placing new AI capacity in Belarus and Kazakhstan, RBC reported Monday, citing IT industry sources.

No sites have been chosen. Multiple locations are under review, and the ministry has not committed to a final list. The talks reflect a wider shift in how Russian operators think about AI compute planning — geography now follows megawatts, not national borders.

Why is Russia looking abroad?

Moscow's power grid offers a useful snapshot of the domestic squeeze. The region's installed capacity sits at roughly 22.6 GW, with a strategic reserve of only about 12%. Authorities have discussed lifting that reserve to 15%, but that conversation comes after a year of rolling outages across the Moscow region, as demand has outrun forecasts.

The Moscow Times previously reported that some new Moscow facilities cannot connect to the grid at all — every available megawatt is committed. For practitioners, that translates into delivery dates slipping by quarters, not weeks.

What is stalling the domestic pipeline?

RBC's sources point to three pressures:

• High cost of capital as financing conditions tighten across Russian lenders
• Rising construction and utility tariffs across most Russian regions
• Grid interconnect queues pushing commissioning timelines by one to two years

Taken together, those three forces have frozen roughly 30% of the announced project pipeline. Earlier this year, the government unveiled two new data centers in St. Petersburg, but that pair represents a sliver of what sat on the drawing board twelve months ago.

Does the war in Ukraine play a role?

RBC's reporting acknowledges speculation that knock-on effects from the war — sanctions, supply chain friction, financing limits — have compounded the squeeze. The piece doesn't quantify that impact, and Moscow's grid planners have not publicly tied specific outages to wartime disruption.

What is verifiable: capacity additions have not kept pace with surging AI training demand. Russia is not the only market where that's true, but the headroom gap is unusually visible.

What do Belarus and Kazakhstan bring to the table?

Two things operators care about: grid headroom and proximity to the Russian market. Neither country has published details about hosting arrangements, and the Russian ministry has not named counterpart agencies or signed any public agreements.

For practitioners reading this from a procurement or siting desk, the practical question is whether regulators will treat cross-border compute capacity as domestic — data residency, tax treatment, latency guarantees. That answer isn't in the public record yet.

How does this compare?

Russia's 12% reserve is the headline number. Authorities want to push it to 15%, but operators are already being told their projects can't connect. That gap — three percentage points of theoretical headroom versus zero practical headroom for new builds — captures why the ministry is now looking abroad.

What's next?

Expect more consultations through the end of the year. RBC's sources cautioned that the discussions remain preliminary, meaning any deployment timeline is a guess, not a plan.

The signal for now: Russia's AI compute buildout is no longer a purely domestic story. The grid is the constraint, and the grid is full.