Capital expenditures for data center construction in Russia will fall by 30%

Capital expenditures for construction of new data centers in Russia in 2026 will fall by 30% compared to 2025 — to 515 billion rubles, according to CNews data.

How Much Will Be Spent on Data Centers in 2026

Total capital expenditures on data centers in Russia — including both new construction and replacement of obsolete IT capacity in already operating data centers — by the end of 2026 will amount to approximately 1.26 trillion rubles. This is approximately 10% less than a year earlier. The difference between the decline in new construction spending (30%) and the more modest reduction in total investments (10%) is explained by the fact that spending on equipment replacement in already built data centers declines much more slowly.

• Spending on new data centers will fall by 30% year-on-year — to 515 billion rubles
• Total capital expenditures on data centers will decline by 10% — to 1.26 trillion rubles
• 59% of total spending will go towards replacing IT capacity in existing data centers
• 41% — towards new data center construction

Why Equipment Replacement Dominates

More than half of all investments in 2026 will go not to new facilities, but to replacing IT capacity in already built data centers — servers, storage systems, and network equipment that becomes obsolete and requires updating as workload increases, including from AI services and cloud platforms. This spending structure is typical for a market where the bulk of infrastructure is already built, and focus is shifting toward modernization rather than extensive growth in the number of facilities — similar dynamics were observed in the past on more mature data center markets abroad.

What Lies Behind the Market Slowdown

The decline in capital expenditures for new data center construction may reflect several factors at once: high cost of borrowing, higher prices for imported and localized equipment, as well as the fact that the largest operators have already built up basic capacity in previous years and are now optimizing rather than expanding their facility portfolio. At the same time, demand for computing resources — primarily from cloud providers and companies developing AI services — continues to grow, creating a gap between demand for capacity and the pace of its deployment.

How This Correlates with Capacity Demand

The Russian data center market has grown in recent years due to both commercial cloud providers and internal infrastructure projects of large companies migrating IT systems to local capacity. The slowdown in precisely capital expenditures — that is, investments in new facilities and equipment — while demand for server rack rentals and cloud resources remains or grows, typically leads to higher utilization of existing capacity and, in perspective, to a shortage of free racks at major data center operators.

What This Means

The slowdown in capital investment in new data centers against the backdrop of growing demand for computing power for AI services may limit the pace at which Russian cloud providers are able to expand infrastructure, and push the market toward more active modernization of existing data centers instead of building new ones.