Page 131 - RusRPTFeb23

9.1.7 TMT sector news
At the end of December, the Ministry of Digital Development summed up the massive ten-month exodus of IT specialists from Russia. According to the ministry, in 2022, about 10% of employees of IT companies, or more than 100,000 people, left the country and did not return. In total about 35 thousand who left and did not return after the first, spring, wave of emigration and about 70-80 thousand who left after the announcement of "partial mobilisation" in September. And if in the first wave, men and women left in approximately equal proportions, then in the second wave, there were already two “IT people” per one “IT woman” who left.
According to Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), most of the Russian IT specialists moved to the USA — this country appeared in more than 10% of accounts. Next come Germany (7.6%), Georgia (6.2%), the Netherlands (5.3%) and Armenia (4.7%). Interestingly, after two waves of emigration, the number of GitHub users in Georgia grew by 94%, and in Armenia by 41%. Even in Kazakhstan, which even before all the events had a lot of its own open source developers, this increase was 12%, Novaya Gazeta Europe writes.
The popularity of Kazakh data centres among Russian firms increased last year, Vedomosti newspaper has reported. Taking into account known impacts of the Ukraine war, this was likely related to the substantial migration of Russian IT specialists to Kazakhstan in 2022 along with the growing reliance of Russian firms on Kazakhstan to conduct business amid sanctions imposed against Russia and the inaccessibility of foreign services. Many Russian firms are acquiring computing power from Kazakhtelecom, Transtelecom and other Kazakh data centre operators. The percentage of Russian legal entities relying on Kazakh data centres grew to 8% in 2022 from only 1-2% in 2020-2021. The figure is predicted to move up further to 10% in 2023. According to analytical data, around 18,000 legal entities use Kazakhstan-based cloud platforms, with 2,000 of such users expected to be from Russia by end-2023.
Russia will slash its support for the development of AI technologies more than 10-fold after the fallout of the military invasion of Ukraine, Kommersant daily reported comparing the December 2022 government AI development roadmap to that approved in 2019. bne IntelliNews has already covered the systemic importance of sanctioned foreing components, which are used, among other things, in Russian supercomputers and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Reportedly, the government will only allocate RUB25bn for the development of artificial intelligence technologies in Russia by 2030, with another RUB100bn to be invested by state-controlled bank Sber (Sberbank), according to the 2030 roadmap approved by the Ministry of Economic Development at the end of December 2022.
131 RUSSIA Country Report February 2023 www.intellinews.com