Yandex Cannot Say When Alice AI Will Return After Third Drone Strike

A Ukrainian drone strike on October 11 knocked Yandex's 50-megawatt Vladimir data center completely offline, the third of the company's publicly known supercomputer-class facilities disrupted in four days after strikes on Sasovo in the Ryazan region on October 8 and Kaluga on October 9, according to Reuters and Al Jazeera. Yandex has given no timeline for restoring Alice, its voice assistant and chatbot, along with Search, Maps, Taxi and Mail, and Reuters reported the company could not confirm whether equipment at Sasovo — which housed two of its three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, used to train its neural networks — can be restored at all. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Kyiv's role, telling Reuters Ukraine "always responds in kind.

Three Yandex data centers down in four days. This time the company isn't saying when, or if, Alice comes back. Three facilities in four days is no longer a string of bad luck for Yandex. A Ukrainian drone strike knocked its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, completely offline on October 11. Strikes had already hit a site in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, on October 8, and another in the Kaluga region on October 9. According to Reuters and Al Jazeera, the Vladimir attack disrupted access to Alice, Yandex's voice assistant and chatbot, along with Search, Maps, Taxi and Mail. The company has given no timeline for when any of it returns. That's the real shift from where this story stood a few days ago. After the first strike, Yandex said only that the scale of the damage was still being assessed. After the third, the posture hadn't improved, it had hardened into open uncertainty about whether some of the hit equipment can be restored at all. The Sasovo facility alone housed two of Yandex's three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, the machines the company uses to train its neural networks. Chervonenkis ranked 19th on the world's Top 500 supercomputer list in 2021. Reuters reported that Yandex could not confirm whether the data center equipment in Sasovo could be restored at all. That's a stark admission for a company that has spent years positioning itself as Russia's answer to Google and OpenAI combined. The Vladimir site that went dark on October 11 was no minor backup location. The Moscow Times and Al Jazeera both reported it as a 50-megawatt facility supporting more than 80 of Yandex's digital platforms and its cloud division. Losing it on top of Sasovo and Kaluga means Yandex has now had all three of its publicly known supercomputer-class facilities disrupted inside a single week. Ukrainian Drones Knock Out Supercomputers at Two Yandex Data Centers https://startupfortune.com/ukrainian-drones-knock-out-supercomputers-at-two-yandex-data-centers/ Yandex confirmed fires and full shutdowns at its Sasovo and Kaluga sites on back-to-back days, October 8 and 9, after drones hit supercomputers tied to training its YandexGPT model and disrupted services for Russian Railways and MegaFon. - ukrainian drones attack yandex data centers russia https://startupfortune.com/ukrainian-drones-knock-out-supercomputers-at-two-yandex-data-centers/ - how ukrainian military targets russian ai infrastructure https://startupfortune.com/ukrainian-drones-knock-out-supercomputers-at-two-yandex-data-centers/ The user-facing damage traveled well beyond Russia's borders. Outages hit banking apps, taxi bookings and grocery delivery across dozens of Russian cities, and the ripple reached Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, where consumers also rely on Yandex's cloud backbone. Russian state media and e-commerce sites that lean on Yandex infrastructure reported their own slowdowns on October 8, the day of the first strike, according to Kurs.com.ua. What this does to Russia's AI ambitions Yandex has spent the past two years trying to build a credible domestic alternative to Western large language models. Alice is its consumer front end, and its in-house supercomputers are the training backbone behind it. You can't train competitive models on hardware that keeps catching fire. Losing Lyapunov and Chervonenkis for an unknown stretch doesn't just interrupt a chatbot, it stalls the actual compute pipeline behind whatever comes after Alice. Frankly, the pattern here matters more than any single outage. Three hits in four days reads less like bad luck and more like a campaign. Militarnyi and Euronews both reported that Ukrainian officials have framed the strikes as retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukraine's own power and telecom infrastructure. Reuters quoted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming Kyiv's role, saying Ukraine "always responds in kind." That framing points to something bigger than Yandex's balance sheet. Data centers have always been treated as civilian infrastructure in most conflicts. Distance from the front line does that, and so does the assumption that compute, unlike a power plant or a rail line, isn't a military target. Ukraine's drones just erased that assumption for one of Russia's most valuable tech companies, and there's no reason to think the exposure stops at Russia's border. Any country running AI infrastructure within drone range of an active adversary is now watching this story for the same reason insurers watch a flood. Yandex's shares fell more than 3% after the first strike, according to Reuters, and the company has yet to put a dollar figure or a repair date on any of the three sites. Until it does, the honest answer to what happens to Alice is the one Yandex itself gave: nobody knows yet. Also read: Google's AI model called Hurricane Isaias before it even had a name https://startupfortune.com/googles-ai-model-called-hurricane-isaias-before-it-even-had-a-name/ • Andrej Karpathy says the AI capability gap is now a sharp funnel https://startupfortune.com/andrej-karpathy-says-the-ai-capability-gap-is-now-a-sharp-funnel/ • OpenAI's secret math model spent three hours of compute per answer https://startupfortune.com/openais-secret-math-model-spent-three-hours-of-compute-per-answer/ Putin is pulling Russia’s AI race closer to the Kremlin https://startupfortune.com/putin-is-pulling-russias-ai-race-closer-to-the-kremlin/ Putin is consolidating Russia’s AI development around Kremlin-linked institutions and politically connected figures. The move signals a more centralized, security-driven AI model that raises new supply-chain and export-control risks for Western technology companies. - how Russia's government controls artificial intelligence development https://startupfortune.com/putin-is-pulling-russias-ai-race-closer-to-the-kremlin/ - Putin's AI strategy and Western tech supply chains https://startupfortune.com/putin-is-pulling-russias-ai-race-closer-to-the-kremlin/ This article is posted in AI News https://startupfortune.com/category/ai/ , check it out for more related stories. Join the discussion Open in the community → https://startupfortune.com/community/ Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.