Machinepower Index / Dossiers / Russia
Russia
Siege Autarky — Sovereignty by necessity. Cut off from allied hardware and markets, the state is forced into full-stack indigenisation on whatever silicon it can obtain.
Score = the average of Watts, Weights and Will, minus a bottleneck penalty of 0.2 × the weakest axis's distance from 10. Potential = the average alone. The gap between them is what fixing the bottleneck is worth.
The three layers
Energy, grids, data centres and silicon — the physical capacity to run models at scale.
Models, alignment capability, standards influence and the talent that produces them.
The capacity to wire AI into the state and the economy while holding public consent.
Where the score comes from
Each axis is the straight average of its four measured sub-dimensions. Nothing is weighted inside an axis; every number below is a rubric-judged 0–10 assessment against published sources under twelve months old.
| Layer | Sub-dimension | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Watts | Planning & Permitting | 7.6 |
| Firm Power Capacity | 7.2 | |
| Sovereign Compute | 4.5 | |
| Hardware & Silicon Access | 1.5 | |
| Weights | Frontier Model Output | 4.3 |
| Alignment Capability | 6.0 | |
| Regulatory Standing | 7.4 | |
| Talent Density | 5.5 | |
| Will | State Procurement | 6.0 |
| Public Sector Adoption | 7.0 | |
| Workforce Transition | 6.8 | |
| Public Trust | 6.6 |
Bottlenecks
The weakest axis sets the penalty. These are the constraints that hold Russia below its Potential.
Assessment
Forced into isolation, Russia relies heavily on domestic model weights coached by local search/banking giants (Yandex and Sber) and locally generated energy. However, severe sanctions lock it out of global advanced foundry/GPU supply corridors, while massive talent emigration severely caps its intelligence potential. Its sovereignty is highly insulated but structurally resource-constrained.
The art of the possible
Russia's realistic upside is resilience rather than parity: domestic models serving the Russian-language world, and compute built on cheap energy within sanction constraints. Any thaw in chip access would change its trajectory faster than any domestic lever.
Strategic play — Siege Autarky
Sovereignty by necessity. Cut off from allied hardware and markets, the state is forced into full-stack indigenisation on whatever silicon it can obtain.
The play is editorial, not scored: it names the game Russia's measured position supports. Eight plays run across the Index — Total Sovereignty, Strategic Autonomy, Chokepoint Leverage, Diffusion Advantage, Compute Rentier, Specialist Power, Sovereign Capital and Siege Autarky.
Open Russia in the live Index → — full provenance cards, source dates, comparison tool and CSV export.