en.Wedoany.com Reported - According to the "2026 Cloud Trends in Russian Enterprises" research report jointly released by VK Tech, Apple Hills Digital, Cloud.ru, and Selectel, 46% of Russian enterprises are using artificial intelligence in the cloud, piloting it, or planning to launch within the next year. Among them, 35% have increased AI budgets, with this spending growth rate surpassing cybersecurity to become the primary growth direction for IT investment.
The report indicates that one in four companies (24%) is already running AI workloads in the cloud, while another 22% are piloting or will launch within a year. The most common approach is open-source model as a service, adopted by 37% of cloud provider customers, surpassing ready-made AI services in SaaS. This is followed by cloud AI agents and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs), each accounting for 27%. Additionally, 36% of enterprises chose the cloud due to ready-made models and services, while 32% valued the speed of experimentation.
Anatoly Trifonov, head of the cloud services department at Onlanta LLC (ООО 'Онланта'), a subsidiary of the Lanit Group (ГК 'Ланит'), stated that enterprises prefer using AI in the cloud primarily due to economic and technical feasibility. Training and running modern AI models require enormous computing power, and it is often uneconomical for most enterprises to purchase and maintain their own servers. The cloud solves this problem through a "pay-as-you-go" computing power rental model, which is particularly important for expensive and experimental AI projects.
Dmitry Demidov, head of the innovation laboratory at Norbit LLC (ООО 'Норбит'), a subsidiary of the Lanit Group, pointed out that the cloud is an ideal choice for AI, enabling immediate project launches, access to hardware computing power, and even ready-made integrated hardware and software solutions. At the same time, it is easier to update equipment and adjust configurations based on current needs and workloads. The cloud is best suited for pilot projects, where hypotheses can be validated, and then either scaled up or discontinued.
Yuri Tyurin, technical director of MD Audit LLC (ООО 'МД Аудит'), a subsidiary of the Softline Group, believes that AI has become the primary growth direction for IT budgets, even surpassing cybersecurity. The key to further growth lies in transitioning from experimentation to large-scale replication of successful cases. Once initial projects prove their economic benefits in areas such as analytics or automation, they quickly spread within enterprises and across industries.
Demand for professional support exceeds supply. 41% of enterprises only obtain AI computing infrastructure from providers and deploy it themselves, while only 10% actively collaborate with providers. Enterprises not only need GPU computing power but also ready-made models with deployment support, a demand that remains unmet.
The study also shows that 65% of enterprises increased their IT budgets in 2026. 58% of enterprises work with two or more cloud providers, but 57% manually manage multi-cloud environments. Only one in ten enterprises has mature cloud cost management practices. Infrastructure reliability remains the primary criterion for selecting a provider, but over the next two years, the importance of FinOps tools and AI/ML platforms will increase. Alexey Korulin, head of the product and architecture solutions department at Linx Cloud (ООО 'Связь ВСД'), explained that the more services a business requires, the harder it is for a single provider to meet all needs, prompting enterprises to build "cloud portfolios" tailored to specific tasks.
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