{"slug": "putin-envoy-says-us-and-russia-are-discussing-joint-ai-data-center-deals", "title": "Putin envoy says US and Russia are discussing joint AI data center deals", "summary": "Kirill Dmitriev, who runs Russia's sovereign wealth fund and serves as Putin's economic envoy, told the Russian Energy Week forum in Moscow that the US and Russia are discussing \"joint projects in the field of Russian and US data centres, including with the use of small-scale nuclear power plants,\" saying \"the ice has, in fact, begun to break.\" The comments came one day after President Trump signed an October 16 executive order waiving the Sanctioning Russia Act, suspending a 500% tariff hike on Russian goods and 100% duties on countries buying Russian oil and gas. The pitch faces a hard limit: Nvidia ended direct sales to Russia in fiscal 2023, and export controls on A100 and H100 chips and Blackwell-class systems remain in force, which Trump's tariff waiver does not alter.", "body_md": "*Russia's investment envoy says Washington and Moscow are now talking about building AI data centers together, even as the chips that would run them stay banned from export. The timing, one day after Trump froze a sweeping new sanctions package, is not a coincidence.*\n\nKirill Dmitriev runs Russia's sovereign wealth fund. He's also Putin's point man on US economic outreach. He told the Russian Energy Week forum in Moscow this week that the two countries are discussing \"joint projects in the field of Russian and US data centres, including with the use of small-scale nuclear power plants.\" Reuters, which covered the October 14-16 forum, quoted him saying \"the ice has, in fact, begun to break.\" That's a strikingly concrete claim in a relationship that has mostly produced vague talk of a Ukraine peace deal for the past year.\n\nThe timing matters more than the quote itself. On October 16, Trump signed an executive order waiving the Sanctioning Russia Act, a bill he had personally signed into law only a month earlier. The order suspends a 500% tariff hike on Russian goods and 100% duties on countries still buying Russian oil and gas, according to the Washington Post and ABC News. Trump cited Section 115 authority to act when a waiver serves the \"national interests of the United States.\" The move follows a separate deal Trump struck with Putin last week to release Russian diesel onto global markets as fuel prices climbed. Dmitriev's data center comments landed squarely inside that window of eased pressure, not before it.\n\nWhy would Russia want this? Dmitriev has been making the energy pitch for months: Russia, he argues, has some of the cheapest electricity in the world, and AI data centers are first and foremost power problems. Every hyperscaler racing to build out AI compute is fighting the same bottleneck, whether that's grid capacity in Virginia, water rights in Arizona, or gas turbine lead times everywhere. If Russia can offer cheap power and now, apparently, small modular nuclear plants to run alongside data centers, that's a genuine pitch on paper. It's also one most AI infrastructure coverage hasn't had to weigh. The buildout conversation so far has centred on Gulf states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Southeast Asian sites in Malaysia and Indonesia, and domestic US siting fights in places like Louisiana and Pennsylvania.\n\nHere's the part Dmitriev's pitch conveniently skips past. Nvidia stopped direct sales to Russia in fiscal 2023 and shut its Russian operations entirely. The export controls barring A100s, H100s, and any systems built around them remain in force today, according to Nvidia's own SEC filings. A data center without export-controlled GPUs or the newer Blackwell-class chips isn't an AI data center in any sense that matters to the current boom. It's a warehouse with diesel generators and a nuclear plant next door.\n\n[Nvidia's Revenue Forecast Assumes China Buys Zero AI Chips This Quarter](https://startupfortune.com/nvidias-revenue-forecast-assumes-china-buys-zero-ai-chips-this-quarter/)\n\nNvidia's $108 billion fiscal third-quarter forecast assumes it sells zero AI data center chips to China, even though analysts peg potential Chinese demand at $30 billion. Trump hosts Xi Jinping in Washington on September 24, with Jensen Huang expected at the state dinner and chip access on the agenda. - [Nvidia China AI chip sales forecast outlook](https://startupfortune.com/nvidias-revenue-forecast-assumes-china-buys-zero-ai-chips-this-quarter/) - [state dinner Xi Jinping impact on Nvidia revenue](https://startupfortune.com/nvidias-revenue-forecast-assumes-china-buys-zero-ai-chips-this-quarter/)\n\nThat's the gap between what Dmitriev is describing and what a sanctions waiver actually touches. Trump's October 16 order eases tariffs, oil and gas duties, and some entity-level restrictions, according to the Washington Post's reporting on the executive order's text. It does not touch the Commerce Department's export licensing regime for advanced semiconductors. That runs through an entirely separate legal track from the financial sanctions Congress just passed and Trump just froze. Unwinding chip export controls on Russia would be a far bigger political lift than waiving tariffs, and nothing in this week's reporting suggests it's on the table.\n\nSo what's actually happening here is a negotiation about who holds the cards, not infrastructure. Dmitriev's job is to keep floating economic incentives that make continued US engagement look attractive to Trump: diesel sales, rare earth cooperation, now AI data centers. Trump has shown he's willing to use his waiver authority aggressively when he wants a deal. Antonina Levashenko, an economist quoted by TASS, framed the data center and rare earths talks as strategically important for AI competition, which is the Russian framing Dmitriev wants Western readers to absorb. It's a real negotiating chip. It is not yet a real project, and the distance between those two things is the entire story.\n\nNone of this means the idea is dead on arrival. Energy-rich, chip-poor countries have found workarounds before, and Russia has spent three years building a parallel supply chain for sanctioned electronics through intermediaries in Central Asia and the Gulf. A joint venture structured around Russian power and non-US compute, or around a future where chip controls do eventually ease as part of a broader Ukraine settlement, isn't impossible.\n\nBut that's a different, much later deal. Dmitriev was describing something else this week at a Moscow energy conference, and conflating the two is exactly the kind of thing a negotiator wants a reporter to do.\n\nWatch what happens to the actual export licensing rules, not the press conference quotes. That's where this deal either becomes real or stays a talking point.\n\n**Also read:** [CBRE says AI job cuts will slow office demand growth in Asia Pacific](https://startupfortune.com/cbre-says-ai-job-cuts-will-slow-office-demand-growth-in-asia-pacific/) • [Kimi's new credit card turns spending into AI credits but caps what you can redeem](https://startupfortune.com/kimis-new-credit-card-turns-spending-into-ai-credits-but-caps-what-you-can-redeem/) • [Xiaomi is building a car-phone-home trap and calling it an ecosystem](https://startupfortune.com/xiaomi-is-building-a-car-phone-home-trap-and-calling-it-an-ecosystem/)\n\n*This article is posted in [Technology News](https://startupfortune.com/category/technology/), check it out for more related stories.*\n\n## Join the discussion\n\n[Open in the community →](https://startupfortune.com/community/)\n\nAlmost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/putin-envoy-says-us-and-russia-are-discussing-joint-ai-data-center-deals", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/putin-envoy-says-us-and-russia-are-discussing-joint-ai-data-center-deals/", "published_at": "2026-10-17 11:55:06+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-17 12:05:54.867466+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-chips", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Kirill Dmitriev", "Vladimir Putin", "Donald Trump", "Nvidia", "Russian Energy Week", "Reuters", "Washington Post", "Sanctioning Russia Act"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/putin-envoy-says-us-and-russia-are-discussing-joint-ai-data-center-deals", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/putin-envoy-says-us-and-russia-are-discussing-joint-ai-data-center-deals.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/putin-envoy-says-us-and-russia-are-discussing-joint-ai-data-center-deals.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/putin-envoy-says-us-and-russia-are-discussing-joint-ai-data-center-deals.jsonld"}}