The demand for Russian CPUs has grown considerably throughout 2023, and the reason is none other than the large price rise that the rest of the processors in the Russian market have experienced, due to a growing shortage that is becoming seeing aggravated due to the impact of the sanctions the country has been facing since it decided to invade Ukraine.
That shortage affects not only processors, but also extends to many other components for PCs, data centers and servers, but in this case what is interesting is that the Russian CPUs are serving as a palliative that does not seem to be exempt from problems that, in the end, are also affecting their price.
According to the source of the news, the supply of CPUs designed by Baikal Electronics and MCST is being affected by logistical problems, and that these, together with the growing demand, are increasing the price of said processors. to a level that a few years ago would have been unthinkable. On this topic Sergey Ovchinnikov, CEO of Norsi-Trans (a server and data storage company) made an interesting comment that helps us see it a little more clearly:
“The production of Russian chips in foreign factories has become more complex, which has led to extended logistics chains and, consequently, to an increase in the cost of the final component».
This means that, despite the sanctions, Russia is accessing foreign semiconductor factories where the CPUs of Russian companies such as Baikal Electronics and MCST are produced, and that this is preventing the country from entering a situation of total collapse, which would happen if it ran out of this type of component. In the end, those factories are ignoring the sanctions, resorting to various tricks to cover orders from Russia.
According to recent research, the price of the Baikal BE-T1000 CPU is $110. This chip is a very basic solution made in 28 nm and with two cores, and you could buy it in 2018 for 50 dollars, but its price has more than doubled. It is a fact that companies and retailers are clearing stocks of very old processors with inflated prices, and we also know that imports of x86 processors continue to take advantage of “pitfalls and loopholes” in the distribution chain.
We will see how the situation evolves in the coming months, but for now we see that Russia has managed to save the furniture and that has been able to partially dodge the sanctions.
