Sberbank CEO German Gref said on Wednesday that Russia's largest bank hopes to use Chinese-made processors to run GigaChat, the country's flagship AI model, according to Reuters. Gref made the remarks on Russian state broadcaster Channel One during President Vladimir Putin's two-day visit to Beijing, while sanctions continue to prevent Russia from procuring advanced Western AI hardware.
Gref didn’t specify which Chinese chips Sberbank is interested in, but the most likely candidate is Huawei's Ascend 950 family, which is also a target of intense buying competition among China's own tech giants.
Huawei's training-focused counterpart, the 950DT, isn’t expected to ship until Q4 2026 and carries 144 GB of Huawei's proprietary HiZQ 2.0 memory with 4 TB/s bandwidth. Sber's existing infrastructure relies on a combination of stockpiled Western GPUs, Chinese alternatives, and domestic Russian production that hasn’t yet reached competitive capability for frontier AI workloads. If Sberbank wants a fully Chinese-supplied AI compute stack for GigaChat, it’s going to need both chips at volume.
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