Chinese AI Models Surge in Russian Market
MWS Cloud states that consumption of Chinese large language models in the first half of 2026 on the MWS GPT platform increased 11-fold compared to all of 2025, reaching 400 billion tokens. The model Qwen remains the top consumer of tokens in 2026 (261.1 billion tokens).
Consensus
- Russian businesses increased their use of Chinese large language models in 2026.
- The demand for Chinese LLMs grew significantly across major Russian cloud platforms.
- Qwen was the most consumed Chinese model in terms of token usage.
- The growth in usage is attributed to lower costs and easier payment methods compared to Western models.
- The overall market for LLMs in Russia is projected to grow substantially in 2026.
Points of divergence
- The growth in popularity of Chinese AI models began in early 2025 with the release of the DeepSeek chatbot. — meduza
- The total LLM market in Russia in 2026 is projected to reach 19.6 billion rubles. — kommersant
- The cloud segment of the LLM market is expected to reach nearly 1.5 billion rubles in 2026. — kommersant
- The actual commercial capacity of the cloud LLM market is estimated by Denis Bozhenko to be at least 10–12 billion rubles by year-end. — kommersant
- Chinese models are leading in the open-model segment by number of downloads. — meduza
Coverage (3 sources)
- Chinese artificial intelligence began capturing the Russian market — The Moscow Times
- In Russia, demand for Chinese AI models has sharply increased. They are cheaper and easier to pay for — Meduza
- Russian business has increased consumption of foreign large language models by a multiple — Коммерсантъ