T-Platforms, a Russian company that once planned to build exascale supercomputers and homegrown CPUs, was declared bankrupt this week after the cost of the company’s assets was lower than its obligations. rice field. T-Platforms is he one of the few companies in Russia capable of building world-class high performance supercomputers. The main reason for the collapse was not Western sanctions, but Russia’s attempt to replace Western technology with its own.
Founded in 2002, T-Platforms has built servers and supercomputers that can compete with products from the likes of IBM and HP. Over the years, T-Platforms has developed some of the highest performing supercomputers in Russia based on AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon and Nvidia Tesla processors. For example, the company’s Lomonosov supercomputer with 33,072 CPUs was ranked 18th in the world and his 3rd in Europe.
Eventually, the company expanded its operations outside of Russia and established an office in Hannover, Germany. Hong Kong, China; and Taipei, Taiwan. However, the company ran into trouble with the U.S. Department of Commerce in early 2013. The Commerce Department has accused T-Platforms of selling supercomputers to military end users and nuclear research in violation of US national security. As a result, T-Platforms has been removed from the DoC’s entity list since late 2013 until early 2014.
But after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and faced its first sanctions, the government launched a program to develop microprocessors and other chips domestically to replace AMD and Intel’s x86 offerings. . One company looking to create an Arm-based system-on-chip for government PCs was Baikal Microelectronics, a subsidiary of T-Platforms founded in 2012.
Baikal Microelectronics has secured government grants to accelerate the development of homebrew processors and servers. However, while Baikal Microelectronics has successfully designed several Arm and MIPS based processors, T-Platforms has started selling some of its new servers in Russia, but failed to deliver the product on time. did. As a result, the Russian Ministry of Trade sued Baikal in 2019. Meanwhile, the CEO of T-Platforms was arrested in March 2019 after his company failed to hand over about 9,000 Baikal-based PCs to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. That’s when the company laid off staff and began to scale back operations.
Ultimately, T-Platforms reportedly had to sell its 60% stake in Baikal to Varton in October 2020. C-newsThe company filed for bankruptcy in October 2021. In December 2021, the Moscow Arbitration decided to introduce an external oversight procedure for the T-Platform. Vsevolod Opanasenko, the former CEO of T-Platforms, faces 10 years in prison, but plans to file for bankruptcy. According to some media reports, he controlled his 75% of his T-Platform, while the remaining shares belonged to the Russian government.
The T-Platforms and Baikal Microelectronics websites are no longer in operation.
