Data center: Interros structures bought a block package from the Selectel IT company

The joint venture of T-Technologies and Interros has become the owner of 25% of the authorized capital of Selectel— one of the largest IT infrastructure operators in the Russian Federation. The deal amounted to about 16 billion rubles. This was reported to Izvestia by T-Technologies and confirmed by Selectel. Its capacities will be useful both for the development of high-tech businesses of companies associated with Interros and for projects related to artificial intelligence (AI), the new co-owners of the business say. Such investments are justified — the need for data center services in Russia, as well as around the world, is growing, and demand for them is spurred by the boom in artificial intelligence, experts say.

What is Selectel?

The joint venture of T-Technologies and Vladimir Potanin's Interros, Catalytic People, has acquired 25% of the authorized capital of the Selectel data center operator. This was reported to Izvestia by T-Technologies (in turn, 41% owned by Interros Capital). The deal amounted to about 16 billion rubles.

The investment in Selectel, Russia's largest independent IT infrastructure provider, is fully consistent with T-Technologies' long-term technological development strategy, said Stanislav Bliznyuk, its president.

— As one of the AI leaders in Russia, we see great prospects for the development of specialized AI infrastructure and large-scale platform solutions. Combining AI expertise with Selectel's unique infrastructure expertise opens up many possible synergies for us," he said.

According to Interros CEO Sergey Batekhin, the purchase of a stake in Selectel opens up opportunities for forming joint solutions between Interros assets. In particular, we are talking about the use of the company's IT infrastructure services in the operational activities of T-Technologies.

"The investment also creates the basis for the development of joint solutions with another technological asset of Interros— Reksoft," he added.

Oleg Lyubimov, CEO of Selectel, noted that the company attracts a partner whose vision coincides with its vision.

"The need for IT infrastructure will continue to grow at a double—digit pace over the next 10 years, including through the introduction of digital projects using AI," he added.

T-Technologies emphasized that the cash flow received from previous investments in the high-tech sector was used for investments (Catalytic has a 10% stake in Yandex and 64% in the Tochka business bank. According to the data provided by the organization, Selectel's revenue for the first nine months of 2025 increased by 42% compared to the same period in 2024 to 13.5 billion rubles, adjusted EBITDA by 44% to 7.8 billion rubles, and EBITDA margin was 58%.

The shareholders of Selectel are not disclosed — their names are missing from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. In 2008, the company (then Selectel Data Center Network LLC) was founded by Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Russian-Israeli entrepreneur Lev Leviev, said Leonid Konik, a partner at ComNews Research. By the way, they founded VKontakte together with Pavel Durov in 2006. Currently, Selectel is one of the top 5 owners of Russian data centers in terms of the number of racks, the expert points out. At the same time, according to iKS Consulting, the company is among the top 3 largest in terms of revenue in the infrastructure cloud services (IaaS) market. According to forecasts by iKS Consulting, by 2028 the cloud market in the Russian Federation will reach a volume of 464 billion rubles with an average annual growth rate of about 30%.

The company provides data center services (equipment placement, rack rental, and others) and cloud infrastructure services based on its own data centers (data centers) located in St. Petersburg (Tsvetochnaya), Moscow (Berzarina) and the Leningrad Region (Dubrovka), said the analyst of TMT Consulting." Elena Frolova. Selectel announced the imminent launch of a new site, the Yurlovsky data center, she added.

"The company currently ranks fifth in the Russian commercial data center market in terms of the number of storage facilities: in total, according to our estimates, 88,200 storage facilities have been commissioned in Russian data centers (6800 over the past period of 2025), Selectel has 3612 storage facilities," said Elena Frolova.

What attracts investors to data centers

The acquisition of a stake in Selectel by Catalytic People can be considered one of the largest transactions in the Russian data center market, one of the representatives of the Russian investment community told Izvestia.

In 2020, Rostelecom bought DataLine, which had a number of lines comparable to Selectel (4,800) for 17.5 billion rubles, which was 3.3% of DataLine's annual revenue (although the deal amount included a debt of 4.08 billion rubles), Leonid Konik recalled.

— A year ago, in August, Rostelecom bought the data center building in Medvedkovo for 25.8 billion rubles. It is designed to connect 4,800 northern racks, but at the time of purchase of the facility, this equipment was not there — the building was only provided with large electrical capacity," he said.

In the West, corporations focus on core businesses, and, for example, they purchase IT solutions from independent vendors, and they do the same with IT infrastructure, Leonid Konik added. In Russia, big business has taken a different path: several hundred corporations in industry, the financial sector, retail and other industries have organized subsidiary IT structures that have undertaken the creation of a large number of digital solutions in the interests of the parent group. Many of these IT subsidiaries have also deployed corporate data centers: Russian big business almost does not believe in commercial cloud services, says Leonid Konik. Interros Group was no exception: a few years ago, it bought a stake in the IT company Reksoft, and MMC Norilsk Nickel, which is part of it, has two IT subsidiaries, Norilsk Sphere and Norsoft LLC, he added.

There is a shortage of spare capacity in the commercial data center market in Russia, said Elena Frolova.

— Despite this, market growth in 2025 slowed down compared to 2024 (24% in 2025 versus 29% in 2024) due to financial and investment difficulties associated with the high key interest rate of the Central Bank, international sanctions, as well as a shortage of energy resources in Moscow and St. Petersburg. locations of large consumers of data center services. The deadlines for the commissioning of some projects have been shifted to 2026-2027," she said.

The interest in Selectel is understandable — based on its facilities, Interros structures could implement IT projects related to business development, says Denis Kuskov, CEO of TelecomDaily. At the same time, the demand for data center services from third-party companies will only grow: in the current market conditions, the demand for data processing and storage in the Russian Federation is steadily growing, and the increased interest in AI-based solutions is increasing the pace of this growth, the expert concluded.