The construction of data centers in Russia is constrained by the cost of electricity, and this problem can only be solved at the systemic level — by revising the very concept of the wholesale supplier in the energy market. This position was voiced by Alexander Sidyakin, head of the State Duma Committee on Digital Development and Artificial Intelligence.
According to him, at an electricity price of 6 rubles per kilowatt-hour, data centers will far from everywhere be built, so the state needs to support such projects. The deputy emphasized: without a global revision of the concept of the wholesale supplier in the energy market, the task cannot be solved. Specific steps, however, were not listed.
Betting on the wholesale market
The wholesale market implies trading electricity in large volumes, where buyers work directly with producers. Access to it is not open to all participants, and the conditions are set out in legislation. A data center is a facility with a large number of servers where data is stored and processed. They operate without interruption and consume a lot of electricity, so its cost largely determines the economics of a project.
Energy has become the main constraint for the industry
The statement came amid rapid growth in data center energy consumption. According to a forecast by the National Rating Agency (NRA), by 2030 Russian data centers will consume 26.2 billion kWh — 76% more than in 2025. About 70% of the increase will come from the load from artificial intelligence, which will grow fourfold. According to an estimate by Atomdata, part of Rosatom's structure, the market by the same deadline will need 2.5 GW of new capacity — twice as much as all the country's commercial facilities have now.
The geography of the industry is also changing. According to NRA estimates, the share of the Moscow region in data center capacity by 2030 will decrease from 72% to 51%, while regions outside the two capitals will increase it from 20% to 41%. Researchers explain this by the fact that for training models, what matters is not proximity to the customer but the availability of free energy. In the Irkutsk region and Krasnoyarsk Krai, former mining sites are already being converted into data centers for machine learning and cloud services.
Market participants view the issue of price differently. Konstantin Stepanov, Director for Development and Operations at RTK-TsOD, has noted that the main thing when choosing a site is not the tariff but the availability of free energy in the region and the timeframe for connecting to it. According to him, new large campuses are moving away from overloaded hubs to places where capacity is available.
The authorities are already looking for solutions from several angles. In November 2025, Vladimir Putin instructed the government to work out a model for data centers with their own local generation, including coal. The Cabinet also planned to consider dividing data centers into conventional and AI-specific ones in order to direct subsidies in a targeted manner. At the same time, fines of up to 2 million rubles are being prepared for mining in commercial data centers — in the summer the relevant State Duma committee approved such amendments for the second reading.
Cryptalist analysis: The Russian data center market is entering a phase where the key competitive advantage becomes not access to customers but access to cheap and available energy. Revising the status of the wholesale supplier could redistribute the economics of the industry in favor of large players and regions with surplus generation, but without specific mechanisms and tariff decisions the initiative risks remaining a declaration. For investors, this is a signal to monitor regulatory changes in the energy sector — it is they, and not the demand for computing, that will determine the pace of commissioning new capacity.