The Russian data center market is growing rapidly in monetary terms, but the capacities themselves are expanding significantly slower. According to Strategy Partners, by 2030, the market volume could increase from 225 to 737 billion rubles.
The main reason is the demand for cloud services, AI, and processing large volumes of data. Companies need more and more servers and computing resources, but new spaces for them are not appearing as quickly: in 2025, 4.6 thousand new racks were introduced, compared to 10.8 thousand a year earlier.
Because of this, rent is also becoming more expensive. In Moscow, one server rack already costs an average of 170.8 thousand rubles per month, in St. Petersburg – 138 thousand. At the same time, by 2030, more than half of the market could be accounted for by IaaS – the rental of servers and computing power from cloud providers.
Several factors hinder the rapid construction of new data centers. They require a lot of electricity, and it is difficult to obtain high power in a suitable location. Plus, there are expensive loans and problems with equipment supplies, especially GPU servers for AI tasks.
There is another risk: a data center has to be built several years before full demand appears. An investor invests tens of billions of rubles in advance, and clients are not always ready to guarantee the rental of these capacities just as far in advance. Therefore, the payback period for such projects has already increased from 6–8 to 10–12 years.