The growing potential of nuclear energy will make it possible to consistently expand computing power for artificial intelligence (AI) in Russia, President Vladimir Putin told the 10th anniversary International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence Journey 2025, in Moscow. The wide-ranging conference, organised by Sberbank, also included an exhibition of the latest Russian AI developments.
Touring the exhibition, before the plenary session, President Putin was shown the first domestic anthropomorphic robot developed by Sber, a line of intelligent assistants based on the large language model Gigachat, and the generative AI model, Alice AI, from Yandex. He was accompanied by Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Maxim Oreshkin; Minister of Digital Development, Communications & Mass Media, Maksut Shadayev; and the President and Board Chairman of Sberbank of Russia, German Gref.
In his opening address to the conference, President Putin said generative AI technologies are becoming key and strategic. “Not only the largest companies, but also leading countries, are competing to own their own fundamental language models.”
He added: “We cannot allow ourselves to become critically dependent on foreign systems. For Russia, this is a matter of state, technological, and, I would say, value sovereignty, which is why our country must have a comprehensive set of its own technologies and products in the field of generative artificial intelligence.”
First of all, these are national language models, both fundamental and small, for specific industries. “The entire range of such models must be trained and fully controlled by Russian specialists at all stages, including the verification of the final product.”
The second basic area “is the entire infrastructure for the development and implementation of such national products, including electronic components, data centres, and computing power with stable energy supply.”
The National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence sets the goal of exceeding RUB11,000bn ($141bn) in Russia’s GDP by 2030. “To achieve this goal, I ask the Government and regional leaders to form a national plan for the implementation of generative artificial intelligence at the national level, as well as by industry and region,” Putin said.
He emphasised that implementation of the plan will be the most important tool for creating demand for national fundamental models. “In fact, it will create an entire market for the use of generative artificial intelligence systems. Products based on it should be used in all key industries by 2030. This includes solutions such as intelligent human assistants and AI agents. They should be used in most management and production processes.”
He stressed the “need to remove administrative and legal barriers that hinder the creation and implementation of sovereign domestic technologies as soon as possible”. He noted that in some countries, the attempt to regulate artificial intelligence has slowed the development of new products and ideas. “I repeat, we should not follow this path and repeat other people’s mistakes.”
He said the creation of data centres is intended to become a driver for the emergence of new enterprises and companies, and jobs in promising sectors. “The most important and fundamental task is to ensure a constant, uniform, and reliable supply of data centres with a significant amount of energy. Therefore, the plans for their placement must be clearly linked to the further development of the entire national energy infrastructure, including advanced, modern, and environmentally friendly coal-fired generation, as well as other clean energy sources, including nuclear power.”
He added: “This is our strategic asset and competitive advantage…. It’s not enough to have energy sources; we need constant, powerful energy sources to solve certain problems, and to quickly use the data we’ve already collected, we need energy sources that are close to the consumers of these results. This is a significant challenge, but it’s solvable for us because we are perhaps the only country in the world that is capable, ready, and already producing and using small nuclear power plants.”
He explained: “We can use coal generation in the Kuzbass region, and we can perform certain tasks at our large hydroelectric power plants. Where there are large nuclear units, we can do this…. But in order for the necessary information to reach its destination quickly – it’s a matter of seconds and fractions of seconds, so that everything works efficiently – it’s possible to install small NPPs, but it must be done quickly.”
He continued: “We have unique solutions that can be used for power supply of data centres. We plan to switch to mass production of small floating and onshore NPPs, and we will continue to build data centres based on the largest NPPs. We are ready to offer such complex products to our partners abroad.”
As to long-term plans, “We plan to build 38 nuclear power units in less than two decades, primarily in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. Their total capacity will be almost equal to the capacity of all currently operating NPPs. The growing potential of domestic nuclear energy will allow us to consistently expand our computing capacity for artificial intelligence.”
