Chinese AI models gain ground in Russia

Russian businesses are increasingly adopting Chinese AI models in 2026, with Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi seeing rapid growth across the country’s largest cloud platforms. Demand has surged among MWS Cloud customers, where token consumption for Chinese models in the first half of 2026 reached 400 billion, 11 times more than in all of 2025.

Qwen led usage on MWS Cloud with 261.1 billion tokens, followed by GLM with 91.2 billion and Kimi with 81.4 billion. In Yandex AI Studio, Qwen represented 21.2% of token consumption among foreign models, DeepSeek accounted for 13.5%, and American GPT-OSS models accounted for 7.5%.

Cloud.ru also reported a steep rise in AI activity. In just under eight months of 2026, consumption increased 18-fold, with Chinese models accounting for a significant share of demand.