Russian data center construction spending to fall 30%

Capital spending on new data center construction in Russia will fall 30% in 2026 compared with 2025, to 515 billion rubles, according to CNews data.

How much will be spent on data centers in 2026

Total capital spending on data centers in Russia, covering both new construction and replacement of aging IT capacity in operating facilities, will reach about 1.26 trillion rubles for 2026. That is roughly 10% less than a year earlier. The gap between the 30% drop in new construction spending and the more modest 10% decline in total investment comes down to equipment replacement: spending on refreshing hardware in existing data centers is shrinking much more slowly.

• Spending on new data centers will fall 30% year over year, to 515 billion rubles
• Total data center capex will decline 10%, to 1.26 trillion rubles
• 59% of total spending will go to replacing IT capacity in existing data centers
• 41% will go to building new data centers

Why equipment replacement dominates

More than half of all 2026 investment will go not to new sites but to replacing IT capacity in data centers that are already built: servers, storage systems, and networking gear that ages and needs upgrading as workloads grow, including those from AI services and cloud platforms. This spending mix is typical of a market where most of the infrastructure is already in place and the focus shifts to modernization rather than simply adding more sites. More mature data center markets abroad went through similar dynamics in their time.

What's behind the slowdown

The decline in capital spending on new data center construction may reflect several factors at once: the high cost of debt financing, rising prices for both imported and localized equipment, and the fact that the largest operators already built out their baseline capacity in previous years and are now optimizing their portfolios rather than expanding them. Meanwhile, demand for compute, primarily from cloud providers and companies building AI services, keeps growing. That opens a gap between demand for capacity and the pace at which new capacity comes online.

How this squares with demand for capacity

In recent years, the Russian data center market has grown on the back of both commercial cloud providers and in-house infrastructure projects by large companies moving their IT systems onto local capacity. When capital spending specifically, meaning investment in new floor space and equipment, slows while demand for server rack and cloud resource rentals holds steady or grows, the usual result is higher utilization of existing capacity and, eventually, a shortage of available racks at major data center operators.

What it means

Slowing capital investment in new data centers, set against rising demand for AI compute, may limit how fast Russian cloud providers can expand their infrastructure and push the market toward more aggressive modernization of existing data centers instead of building new ones.