Russian government discusses AI industry support measures worth 72 billion rubles annually

The Russian authorities are discussing a set of tax, financial, and non-financial measures to support the AI industry, totaling about 71.7 billion rubles per year. The proposals were prepared by ANO Digital Economy with the participation of Yandex, Sber, and other market participants, and submitted to the Ministry of Digital Affairs. Of the total, 52.4 billion rubles would go to AI developers and 19.3 billion to stimulate business demand for AI projects. Among the key measures: extending the existing zero profit tax rate and reduced insurance premiums to companies owning national AI models with their own data centers (estimated cost: 31 billion rubles); a multiplier of 2 for expenses on GPUs, network equipment, and hard drives (15.3 billion rubles); a deduction from profit tax for remote access to AI platforms (5.5-12 billion rubles); zero VAT on cloud AI services (1.8 billion rubles). Other proposals include immunity from third-party liability for AI, free use of public data for AI training, regulatory sandboxes in medicine, finance, and meteorology, preferential access to land for data centers, subsidies for data center construction, soft loans for server and GPU purchases, and venture funds for AI projects. The measures are aimed at a broad range of companies, not just Yandex and Sber, and are at an early discussion stage.