Russian businesses are rapidly increasing their use of Chinese artificial intelligence models, drawn by their lower cost and ability to run on domestic infrastructure as Moscow seeks to develop a homegrown “sovereign AI” industry, the Kommersant newspaper reported Thursday.
Customers of Russia’s largest cloud platforms have sharply increased their use of models including Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi in 2026, according to data provided to the newspaper.
The trend highlights Russia’s growing technological reliance on China as Western sanctions and security concerns limit access to U.S.-developed technology. It also exposes the difficulties facing Moscow’s effort to build competitive AI systems of its own.
MTS Web Services Cloud said customers used 400 billion tokens generated by Chinese models in the first half of 2026, 11 times more than in all of 2025.
Qwen was the most widely used Chinese model on the platform, accounting for 261.1 billion tokens. GLM and Kimi generated 91.2 billion and 81.4 billion tokens, respectively.
