Why Russia’s AI-powered economic future lies in its Far East

I attended this year’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok and took part in a dialogue on technological development. There, I had a deep discussion with Maxim Oreshkin, Russia’s deputy chief of the presidential executive office, who co-chairs the country’s national AI headquarters. I left Vladivostok with a broader impression: Russia increasingly sees its Far East as a place to build a new version of its economy. For decades, Russia’s Far East has been understood through geography. It is vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated. At the forum, those characteristics were recast as strategic assets. President Vladimir Putin presented an updated development strategy running to 2036 and called for the Far East and Arctic to serve as testing grounds for advanced technologies. A special legal regime due to begin next year is intended to speed up experimentation. The government is planning new data centres, stronger power infrastructure and next-generation transport systems. The Far East offers Russia something increasingly scarce in mature economies: room to redesign systems at a regional scale. A logistics network can be built around autonomous operations from the outset. New industrial projects can assume that artificial intelligence (AI) will be part of daily work. Public services can be designed around digital tools as they expand. The region has the potential to become a greenfield laboratory for an AI-era economy. Geopolitics gives this experiment urgency. Russia’s confrontation with the West has reduced its access to Western technology, capital and markets. Its economic gravity has consequently moved eastwards. Vladivostok sits at the front edge of a Russia increasingly connected to China and the wider Asia-Pacific. A shift born from geopolitical pressure can still create a development opportunity: old dependencies weaken and new systems have to be built. The strongest consensus I heard at the forum and dialogue was that AI is becoming societal infrastructure. Its long-term importance will come from widespread use, much as electricity transformed economies by becoming ordinary, dependable and cheap enough to be embedded everywhere. I have argued previously in the SCMP that accessibility may become one of the defining sources of advantage in the AI era. A capable model creates value when millions of people and businesses can afford to use it repeatedly. Russia enters this transition with a powerful upstream asset: energy. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Russia remains one of the world’s largest producers of natural gas and oil, while its electricity system also draws heavily on nuclear power and hydropower. In an AI economy, energy can be converted into computation and computation can be converted into intelligence. A country that can supply this chain reliably has a path towards lower-cost AI. The opportunity is real although it depends on execution. Parts of the Far East currently face power capacity constraints and industrial electricity prices have been under pressure. Data centres only become strategic assets when the grid can support them. Russia’s energy advantage is best understood as an upstream advantage that still needs to be converted into reliable electrical capacity and modern computing infrastructure. The human side may be even more important. The economic return from AI depends heavily on whether people learn to work with it. Russia’s challenge is to cultivate a population comfortable with using AI as an ordinary tool. In this context, logistics is an obvious starting point. Large distances and labour constraints make route optimisation, autonomous delivery and coordinated warehousing unusually valuable. Logistics is not only an economically valuable use case but also a setting in which broad-based AI literacy can develop through daily work. This is also why regulation should support learning at scale. The Far East’s proposed experimental legal regime could become important if it creates a controlled environment where organisations can deploy useful systems, measure their effects and improve the rules through experience. The AI infrastructure challenge has three layers: energy, compute and models. Its energy base gives it a strong starting point. Turning that energy into intelligence requires accelerators, servers and data-centre systems at scale. The final layer is a supply of capable models that can be adapted to Russian language, industry and public services. This is where cooperation with Asian partners becomes commercially significant. China has developed increasingly competitive open-weight language models and a growing domestic compute ecosystem. Chinese firms could find demand in Russia for model deployment, inference hardware and the systems needed to connect AI with industrial processes. Such projects would need careful structuring around export controls, sanctions exposure, payments and Russian localisation requirements but the underlying business need is clear. The more interesting opportunity is larger than selling chips or models. If Russia can assemble the full infrastructure, the Far East could become a place where AI is integrated into the design of a region while that region is still being built. That creates a rare chance to study what an AI-powered society looks like when AI enters ordinary economic and public life as part of the underlying operating system. Russia’s eastwards turn was forced by geopolitical rupture. Forced innovation, however, can produce institutional changes that gradual reform rarely attempts. The Far East gives Russia the space to build new infrastructure and a reason to experiment with new rules. It also places the country next to Asian partners that can supply technologies and markets. The Eastern Economic Forum left me with a question that reaches beyond Russia: what happens when a country begins to treat AI the way earlier generations treated electricity? If the experiment works, the Far East may be where Russia’s technological future is built.

Why Russia’s AI-powered economic future lies in its Far East

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}With a 10-year plan, the Far East gives Moscow what mature economies lack: room to redesign systems at regional scale

With a 10-year plan, the Far East gives Moscow what mature economies lack: room to redesign systems at regional scale