Time published an in-depth investigation on June 18 into Russia’s bid to build a domestic AI ecosystem despite sweeping Western chip sanctions. The report, drawn from Russia’s annual Data Fusion conference in April and interviews with researchers and officials, finds that Russia’s AI ambitions are real but severely constrained. At the conference, executives from Russia’s second-largest bank, the state nuclear power company, and the Ministry of Digital Development all named the same bottleneck: compute access. GPU exports from the US, Europe, and Japan have been blocked since 2022; Chinese chips and smuggling through intermediary countries have partially filled the gap, but at significantly lower capability ceilings than what US-allied nations can access. Sberbank CEO German Gref, who leads Russia’s state AI effort, has acknowledged that graphics processing units remain the hardest hardware to replace; a deputy CEO told Reuters earlier this year that Russia is six to nine months behind the US and China across a range of AI parameters, and intends to focus on developing large language models rather than building massive data centres. In April, Putin chaired a dedicated AI development meeting, underscoring the political priority attached to the sector.
On the personnel side, Time’s reporting notes that Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, heads an AI institute opened in 2020 at the centre of a “unified ecosystem” that now also includes a 2025 research centre and a new AI faculty at Moscow State University — the last financially backed by sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Critics cited in the piece describe Tikhonova’s role as likely nepotistic. The broader picture Time paints is of a state pouring political capital into AI sovereignty — forty percent of the federal budget, roughly $238 billion, is directed at defence and security — while facing a structural ceiling set by chip access. China remains Russia’s only realistic source of advanced compute at scale, giving Beijing significant leverage over the pace and character of Moscow’s AI development regardless of their stated partnership.