Putin's 10 percent data center reserve sends Russian capacity underground and abroad

Putin's 10 percent reserve

Vladimir Putin signed the decree on 2 November. It orders data center operators to set aside 10 percent of available space and capacity for government use, Meduza reported. For Russian cloud customers, the practical effect is less certainty about where their workloads run. The decree also shifts risk onto operators. Capacity promised to the state cannot be sold twice. Enforcement is unclear. Neither the Kremlin nor the industry has said publicly how the reserve will be audited. Neither has said what happens to an operator that cannot free the space in time.

Tom's Hardware reported that the reserve covers non-state data centers. It reported that operators must make capacity available within 24 hours of a request. A day is short notice.

Racks are usually committed months ahead. A provider that has promised a customer a block of GPUs may find the state claims a tenth of its floor space before that contract runs out. The decree frames the reserve around emergency state needs, not routine procurement. That framing leaves room for interpretation. Interpretation is where operators lose sleep. A reserve called on once a year is an inconvenience. A reserve called on monthly is a redesign.

Drone strikes hit cloud providers

The decree follows a run of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian infrastructure. Ars Technica reported that the attacks damaged facilities housing AI supercomputers. It reported they disrupted cloud services for millions of Russian users.

Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte and the Russian Ministry of Finance all had data centers degraded or knocked out, according to Ars Technica. Ars Technica reported that the Russian military has bombarded Ukrainian cities and targeted Ukrainian data centers since late September. Ukraine has struck military and infrastructure targets inside Russia. Each side now treats computing capacity as a target.

Underground and abroad

Russian tech companies are scrambling to harden and hide their facilities. State-owned telecom Rostelecom has raised the possibility of moving some Russian data centers underground, in talks with nickel and palladium miner Norilsk Nickel, Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported. A regional governor has proposed building data centers inside open-pit coal mines, with green public parks planted above them as camouflage, according to Data Center Dynamics. A facility that cannot be seen is harder to target. Whether a mine offers the power connections and cooling a modern AI cluster needs is a separate question.

On 3 November, Data Center Dynamics reported that Putin had given Russian companies permission to use foreign data centers.

The foreign route has limits. It depends on cross-border links that the same war can interrupt. It also depends on jurisdictions that may not want the business. The decree opens the door. It does not guarantee that anyone walks through it.

What the decree changes

The reserve is not a nationalization. It applies to non-state data centers and takes a slice of capacity rather than the whole facility.

But a slice with 24 hours notice is enough to change how operators plan, sell and price capacity. It also changes how much redundancy they keep for themselves. No published figure quantifies the outages. Ars Technica described the outages as affecting millions of users.

Every contract signed at home sits under a rule the state can invoke in a day.

The state gains a strategic reserve of private computing capacity on terms it has not published. Operators gain a compulsory buyer for part of their floor space.

Russia's cloud market will adapt, because it has to. The 2 November decree pushes operators toward both at once.

The question is how it adapts. It can build smaller, more dispersed sites that are harder to hit. Or it can move load to friendlier jurisdictions and accept the latency and legal exposure that comes with it.