Foreign manufacturers stop delivering ‘Russian’ Baikal and Elbrus microchips to Russia

The foreign producers of the nominally “Russian” Baikal and Elbrus CPUs have stopped delivering them to Russia.

Kommersant reports that international sanctions have disrupted Russia’s supply of “domestic” CPUs, citing a statement by Maksut Shadayev, Russian minister of digital development.

Shadayev says that 23,000 new computers, servers, and data-storage systems based on Russian-developed microchips were produced in 2022. “We would have had a lot more, if batches of Russian processors that had been ordered and produced had also been delivered,” Shadayev lamented, at a joint State Duma committee meeting on information policy and control.

The minister admits that Russia has no facilities of its own for producing domestic microchips, though it hopes to begin manufacturing CPUs by 2028.

• In mid-September, the U.S. sanctioned both Baikal Electronics and the Elbrus microchip developer MCST.