Russian Post Goes Cloud While Selling Its Historic Headquarters for Billions

Russian Post dropped a massive tender worth up to 5.48 billion rubles to migrate its legacy IT infrastructure and hardware over to professional commercial datacenters. The deal requires the chosen contractor to hook up three distinct facilities—two right in Moscow and one out in the regions—complete with heavy-duty computing gear, storage arrays, and bulletproof backup systems. Industry insiders point out that while the price tag isn't entirely unprecedented given past state-level cloud buying sprees, the company is aiming for a complete turnkey service rather than just renting empty floor space.

The migration makes financial and operational sense since commercial operators can handle maintenance and scaling way cheaper than keeping dusty servers alive in-house. Alexandr Martynyuk from datacenter consultancy DC Square notes that while regional server racks are somewhat available, the Moscow market is facing a severe physical shortage. Meanwhile, Infoline-Analytics boss Mikhail Burmistrov highlights that infrastructure resilience directly impacts sorting and delivery speeds, meaning unexpected IT crashes literally translate to lost revenue and angry customers. The push for redundancy comes as the enterprise struggles with climbing operational losses, even as reporting shows revenue ticking up to 166 billion rubles over nine months. To help balance the ledger, the organization recently listed its historic central Moscow postal headquarters on Myasnitskaya Street with a hefty starting price tag of 7.7 billion rubles.

Selling off ancestral brick-and-mortar landmarks just to fund modern digital cloud pipes is a poetic masterpiece of modern bureaucratic gymnastics. It turns out the fastest way to accelerate physical mail delivery is to turn the main post office into a luxury asset and hide all the computers inside invisible server farms.