Moscow State University or MGU on April 21 opened a new artificial intelligence faculty, completing what investigators described as a unified AI ecosystem built over several years under Katerina Tikhonova, director of the university’s AI Institute and reportedly President Vladimir Putin’s daughter, according to The Bell citing an investigation by T-invariant.

This year, the Kremlin said it would establish a National Artificial Intelligence Headquarters in the form of a presidential interagency commission, with ex-Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin and current Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko appointed as the “AI Czars” to co-chair the new body.

Reportedly, the proposal has been approved by Putin, who has recently been stressing the importance of AI development in public addresses.

According to the investigation, Putin’s alleged daughter Tikhonova now oversees a broad institutional network at MGU that includes a research centre, the AI Institute, the MGU-270 supercomputer and the newly launched faculty. 

The MGU-270 system, introduced in 2024 for AI workloads, was reportedly assembled using sanctioned Nvidia chips obtained through grey import channels via a Chinese company operating under the fictitious brand Solar Peak. 

T-invariant claims that access to the machine is reportedly restricted even for staff of the university computing centre who built MGU’s earlier supercomputers.

The report added that state lender VTB (VTBR), described as one of Tikhonova’s key partners, has been testing Chinese graphics processors since March 2026, reportedly including Huawei’s Ascend 910C, which is marketed as an alternative to the export-restricted Nvidia H100. 

The new faculty was also reportedly established with financial backing from sanctioned aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska. Planned intake is 36 undergraduate and 36 postgraduate places, while annual tuition for fee-paying students is around RUB500,000 ($5,400).

T-invariant investigation claims parts of the new research ecosystem appear to have potential dual-use applications, including AI-guided drones, gait recognition systems for crime prevention and joint laboratories with the MSU PPI University in Shenzhen, where drone technologies are also being developed for cargo delivery.