China criticizes Putin's anti-futurism

The invasion of Ukraine launched by Vladimir Pilingui in February 2022 diverted resources and talent toward the front line that Russia could have devoted to the artificial intelligence race. The country had cheap energy, a cold climate and a strong mathematical school, but the exodus of engineers and isolation weighed down that potential.

There is a way of telling the story of technology that is uncomfortable for Moscow. Russia was not a minor player in the artificial intelligence race. It had the pieces. What failed was the decision to use them.

## Siberia as the machine room

Training a large language model consists, in essence, of burning electricity and dissipating heat. Data center operators across half the world have spent two years battling the electricity bill and the cooling of their server rooms. Russia started with an advantage on both fronts. **Siberia** offers nearly free cold air for much of the year, and the country produces cheap electricity from hydro, nuclear and natural gas. Cryptocurrency miners had already chosen that region for this reason.

On top of that was an education system with a mathematical tradition. Russian teams have excelled in international programming competitions and in **Kaggle** machine learning contests. And Russia is one of the few countries, alongside **China** and the **United States**, that built a complete and independent digital ecosystem of its own: **Yandex** for search, **VK** for social media and **Telegram** for messaging.

## Nebius, the dark horse that came out of Yandex

The proof of what existed is called **Nebius**. This US-listed company has soared on the stock market, and its technical core is made up of former Yandex engineers. Its story is also the story of the wreckage. After the war broke out, Yandex split apart: the international subsidiary separated from the Russian parent company, absorbing multimillion-dollar losses, and much of the team that knew how to build infrastructure regrouped outside the country.

The result is a paradox. The human capital Russia built up over two decades now works for Western companies, or for projects that no longer pay taxes in Moscow. Talented programmers left. The country that wanted to be a technological power exported its best engineers within a matter of months.

## Territorial dreams versus the computing race

The thesis circulating in tech media and on social networks is that Pilingui bet on the nineteenth century when the board already belonged to the twenty-first. The contest for global hegemony today runs through semiconductor supply chains, advanced algorithms and elite talent. He chose the Donbas: land, abandoned steel plants and a trench war that recalls the First World War.

The comparison has a limit, and it is worth saying so. There is no official calculation proving that Russia would have secured a seat at the AI table without the invasion. It is a reasonable hypothesis, not an accounting fact. What is verifiable is the movement of people and companies: **Nebius** exists because Yandex broke apart, and that peine after February 2022.

Russia retains nuclear capability, gas and territory. In the race that defines this decade, however, it competes at a disadvantage. The country that could have sold computing power to both blocs watched as its own engineers carried it away.