Consumption of Chinese LLMs in Russia Soars Over 11-Fold

MWS Cloud, a subsidiary of MTS Web Services, analyzed consumption of Chinese large language models by Russian companies using data from its MWS GPT Model Hub and MWS GPT platforms. In the first half of 2026, consumption volume exceeded 400 billion tokens, an 11.3-fold increase from the 39.1 billion tokens spent in all of 2025. The most in-demand model families were Qwen, GLM, and Kimi. Large enterprises are the main users, applying LLMs to automate customer interaction through chatbots for 24/7 support, generate personalized marketing content, and analyze feedback sentiment. The overall Russian LLM market is expected to grow 35% in 2026 to about 19.6 billion rubles, with the cloud segment reaching nearly 1.5 billion rubles. In response to growing demand, MWS Cloud expanded its MWS GPT Model Hub catalog to 17 models, adding GLM 5.2, the open-source LLM from Z.AI, which was rated the best LLM for agentic tasks by MWS AI, and becoming the first company in Russia to host such a model in its cloud. Other new additions include Kimi K2.6, Qwen3.6, Gemma 4, GPT OSS, plus speech recognition (ASR) and speech synthesis (TTS) models and rerankers for improving search and RAG pipelines. All models are accessible through a unified OpenAI-compatible API, simplifying integration and switching between them.