Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev announced the proposal at a meeting with industry representatives on 6 November, Vedomosti reported, citing three sources.
Operators would have to rank clients in advance. If capacity is needed, the operator would have to terminate the contract with a less important customer or warn it that it must leave the site within 24 hours.
President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on 2 November reserving 10% of the space and capacity of private data centres for state needs. Requests for the reserve will come directly from the Digital Development Ministry or from a subcommission of the government commission on digital development to be created under the decree. Operators will have 24 hours to comply.
Disconnecting clients is to be treated as force majeure, freeing the operator from liability. Sources told RBC that failure to meet the reserving requirements could lead to temporary management being imposed.
The reserve can be calculated across all of an operator's sites combined, so setting aside 10% at each individual site will not be required. The rules apply only to commercial data centres, not to corporate facilities companies use for their own needs, such as bank data centres.
The ministry called the measure temporary but gave no specific end date: the requirements will remain in force until the decree is repealed or amended. A ministry representative said the measures are "under development" and added that all requirements "will be formed together with experts and market participants".
According to iKS-Consulting, by the end of 2025 the Russian commercial data centre market had 85,800 rack spaces. Housing the infrastructure of Gosuslugi alone, which is on the white list, would require about 900 racks, a Vedomosti source at a cloud provider said. At the average Moscow price, renting that many 5 kW racks costs about 1.84 billion rubles a year, excluding VAT.
In October, five data centres belonging to Yandex, Sberbank and VK in several regions were hit, causing widespread outages of Runet services. In late August, Putin signed a decree allowing temporary management to be imposed on critical infrastructure facilities whose owners failed to protect them from security threats, including attacks by Ukrainian drones.