Ukraine has struck Russian data centers run by Yandex, disrupting telecom systems and the apps and services that run on them, Reuters reports. The strikes were in retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says.
Throughout the almost five-year war, Russia has repeatedly struck civilian housing and service facilities like hospitals and schools, while both sides have attacked energy infrastructure, retail warehouses, and telecom facilities. Data centers are the latest escalation, with each side trying to cripple the other's internet connectivity and broader digital infrastructure.
In these latest strikes, Ukraine struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region, on Wednesday, causing widespread internet outages for Russian citizens. This was followed by a second strike early Thursday morning on a second Yandex data center in the Kaluga region. With a capacity of 63 megawatts, it's Yandex's largest data center in Russia and supports its Yandex Cloud platform, Reuters notes.
Damage to the facilities is still being assessed, but the first targeted data center is offline, and Yandex is reportedly evaluating whether any hardware can be salvaged. We don't know the exact makeup of the servers inside the data center, but Yandex has previously boasted of hosting thousands of Nvidia A100 GPUs for its supercomputing and AI clusters.
The Sasovo data center previously hosted two of the three Yandex supercomputers, which were used to train its YandexGPT large language model.
With sanctions in place and global GPU shortages, Russia will struggle to find replacements for damaged hardware on any effective timeline. Not to mention that data centers tend to take years to build. Even the hundreds of billions invested in AI data centers in countries that aren't under threat from drone attacks are taking a long time to complete.
Yandex operates four major data centers in Russia, as well as some smaller facilities, so it may be able to temporarily shift its services to an alternative location to ensure services are restored. Its two remaining untouched data centers are located in Mytishchi and Vladimir regions, both within Ukrainian strike range.
Russia also faces a more difficult road back to functional internet services because it operates a more restricted internet service. Whereas Ukraine can lean on its international partners to operate cloud services, Russia cannot. Its allies include North Korea and Iran, neither of which has a strong cloud computing industry.
If Russian national apps and services go down, the general public can't just switch to international alternatives, either. Russia has banned almost all foreign-made applications for major social media, streaming, and messaging. If and when more Yandex services go down, they could take large portions of Russia's digital services with them.