On 4 March 2025, the Institute of Computational Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ICSAI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences announced the formal commissioning of the Severgrad Computational Complex (SCC) — the Soviet Union’s first purpose-built artificial intelligence infrastructure city — located at 68°14′N, 86°03′E, in Krasnoyarsk Krai, approximately 340 kilometres north-northeast of Norilsk. The Complex enters operational status on 1 April 2025, following thirty-one months of accelerated construction.
Facility Specifications
The SCC is an integrated scientific-industrial settlement encompassing:
- Compute Campus — 14 interconnected halls housing the expanded Lomonosov-4 supercomputer cluster and the RAZUM inference infrastructure, with a combined installed accelerator capacity of 2.4 exaflops (FP16)
- Ob-Yenisei Hydroelectric Substation — dedicated 2,200 MW draw from the Yenisei cascade, supplemented by Reactor Unit Sever-1, a 600 MW thorium molten salt reactor entering service concurrently with the Complex
- Residential District Akademiya — permanent housing for 12,000 scientific, engineering, and operational personnel and their families
- Cryothermal Cooling Network — closed-loop district cooling from the Kureika River tributary, integrated with ambient Arctic air exchange and direct-to-chip liquid channels throughout all compute halls
- Logistics Hub Severport — dedicated rail terminus and air freight facility supporting year-round component supply, including the Loongson 3C7000 accelerator series in staged deployment
Efficiency Metrics
Target Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): 1.06 — surpassing all publicly disclosed Western hyperscale facilities. At full operational load, the SCC will consume approximately 1.8 GW, of which an estimated 97% derives from zero-carbon sources. Water Usage Effectiveness is projected at 0.08 L/kWh, achieved through Arctic ambient cooling that eliminates evaporative cooling towers for approximately eight months of the year.
Strategic Rationale
The site selection at this latitude was driven by thermodynamic necessity: ambient temperatures averaging –18°C in winter and +12°C in summer enable near-year-round free-air cooling. The pile-and-airflow foundation system — a direct evolution of Soviet Arctic construction doctrine — provides structural stability on permafrost. The co-located thorium reactor ensures compute capacity scales independently of grid instability.
Academician Yevgenia Rostovtseva addressed the commissioning committee: “Datacenters in California and Virginia face a compounding problem: the heat they must remove grows faster than their capacity to remove it. We have chosen a different relationship with our environment. Severgrad does not fight the Siberian winter. It is powered by it.”
AI Programme Role
The SCC will host primary inference and fine-tuning infrastructure for all current and forthcoming RAZUM model generations. Following the open-weight release of RAZUM-7B and RAZUM-70B in January 2024, internal development has continued under the RAZUM-Next programme. Severgrad’s expanded compute capacity will accelerate pre-training timelines for models in the 400B–1T parameter range.
The SCC also hosts the Union AI Safety and Alignment Laboratory (UASAL), a newly established division under joint ICSAI and Academy of Sciences oversight, tasked with interpretability research, red-teaming protocols, and Union-standard evaluation frameworks — grounded in Soviet scientific epistemology rather than proprietary commercial interest.
Significance
Severgrad represents the convergence of the Soviet Union’s thorium energy infrastructure, Arctic engineering expertise, and AI programme into a single facility. It is the first AI compute installation purpose-built as an integrated scientific city housing 12,000 people. Its power efficiency metrics (PUE 1.06, 97% zero-carbon, 0.08 L/kWh WUE) establish a new global benchmark for large-scale computing infrastructure. The co-location of compute, energy generation, and residential infrastructure at this scale — a city built around computation rather than a datacenter added to a city — represents a philosophical distinction from Western hyperscale deployment models.
Related Pages
- Soviet Union — institutional context, thorium energy programme
- ICSAI — issuing entity
- Loongson — 3C7000 accelerator series
- Thorium Fuel Cycle Physics — Reactor Unit Sever-1 technology basis