In 2023, Intel’s operations in Russia were drastically pared back, leaving just one employee as the director of both Intel AO and Intel Technologies. Alina Klushina is listed as the director of both Intel’s Russian entities, reportsAbachy. The mothballed businesses incurred losses of $2.31 million over the last year.
This rapid transformation of Intel’s Russia business began shortly after the invasion of Ukraine. In April 2022, Intel said itsuspended all operations in Russia, following up an earlier decision to suspend tech shipments into the country (the Ukraine War began in Feb 2022).
A bullet-point timeline charting the decline of Intel’s Russia operations is as follows:
Intel opened its Nizhny Novgorod research and development center in 2000, nine years after setting up in Russia. It earned a good reputation for software, AI, machine vision, 5G, and IoT development. This R&D center was revamped in 2020 and employed over 1,000 individuals at the time. Meanwhile, the Intel AO business unit is said to have covered information processing and software development. Intel Technologies was responsible for marketing, tech support, and consultancy.
After the initial cessation of Intel’s product and service flow in Russia, the firmrestored user accessto driver downloads – honoring its service and warranty obligations. However, we have since seen reports with evidence that the applied sanctions have failed in practical terms. In January, for example, we reported on Russian entities buying up to$1.7 billion worthof Intel (and AMD) chips in 2023. Many of the chips arrived in Russia as re-exports via places like China, Turkey, or the UAE.
Intel seems to be continuing to maintain its Russian properties, watched over by Klushina, in the hope of favorable political developments. Hopefully, an end to the war. It seems reasonable to expect losses of a similar scale to 2023 (USD 2 to 3 million) in the coming year, probably the minimum required to maintain its mothballed operations.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
