Antonina Levashenko, Head of International Best Practices Analysis Department at the Gaidar Institute, assessed the prospects for possible cooperation between Russia and the US in the field of high technology in a comment for TASS. According to the expert, joint projects between the two countries on the construction of data centers and the development of rare earth metals (REM) are promising in terms of the growth in demand for data center capacity.
Antonina Levashenko emphasized the scale of the projected growth: " According to Goldman Sachs, demand for new data centers will grow by 17% every year until 2028 and will increase by 130% by 2030 from 2023 levels. This is strategically important for economic competition in the field of AI. In the US alone, spending on the construction of this infrastructure has tripled over the past three years: Demand for electricity is growing at a tremendous rate, which is why many international technology/energy companies are already considering options for using nuclear energy (for example, with small modular reactors) as a resource on which to build data centers (for example, already in the US). In this regard, joint projects may be implemented by Russian and US companies involved in both nuclear energy (e.g., micro reactors) and the development of solutions for the use of nuclear fusion in data centers," the expert said.
The expert cites access to rare earth metals as the second critically important area, with demand for these metals expected to increase 20 to 40 times by 2040, according to IEA forecasts. According to Antonina Levashenko, cooperation with the US could help Russia make up for possible shortages, given the slow pace of development of its own deposits and the high demand for modern extraction technologies.
"The US and Russia, for example, have promising rare earth metal deposits. The countries can cooperate, for example, in joint research, as well as in the exchange of technologies, such as technologies for assessing deposits for the presence of rare earth metals, enrichment/extraction technologies, for example, the extraction of rare earth metals from phosphogypsum. Joint Arctic projects could be considered, for example, due to the geographical accessibility of the Arctic zone for both countries, which could contribute to the implementation of the discussed project to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait between Russia and the US," the expert noted.