Russian AI Giant Yandex Hit By Second Drone Strike In Two Days As Data Centres Become Big Targets In War

· Free Press Journal

Russian technology and AI company Yandex said that several modules at its data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, were completely disabled by a drone attack. It is the company's second data centre strike in two days, according to Reuters. Yandex said no one was injured but warned that some of its services may be disrupted.

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The Second Strike: Kaluga

Yandex wrote on X that "part of Yandex data center infrastructure in Kaluga was damaged in a drone attack" and that "several data center modules are completely disabled.". The company has not said when the site might return to service.

The First Strike: Sasovo

On Thursday, a Ukrainian drone hit Yandex's Sasovo data centre in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, according to Reuters. The strike started a fire and forced operations at the site to stop. Sasovo is one of Yandex's five major data centres and houses tens of thousands of servers. Yandex said its main consumer services were not disrupted, but customers of Yandex Cloud were told there were electricity supply problems in one data centre "zone" and advised to use others.

Why is Yandex Sasovo center important?

Sasovo is where two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model are housed. Yandex said in 2021 that these machines are built around Nvidia A100 chips and used to train YandexGPT. Yandex said it is still assessing the damage and could not confirm whether the equipment can be restored. That uncertainty matters because Sberbank, Yandex's main domestic rival, says Russian AI developers already lag US and Chinese counterparts by six to nine months, with sanctions-hit chip imports the main bottleneck.

After the Sasovo strike, online services including real estate aggregator Cian, book portal Litmarket, the Russian Railways website and the site of football club Spartak Moscow reported problems. A state-owned bus company in the Moscow region said online ticket sales were unavailable because of a data centre shutdown. Monitoring service Detector404 logged 58,268 user complaints in a day. Yandex shares on the Moscow Exchange fell 3 percent.

Zelensky: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion"

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not claim the strikes explicitly. On Thursday he said, "We always respond in mirror-like fashion. You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding. I can't share all the details."

A widening target list

Both sides have expanded drone attacks this year from energy facilities and refineries to ports, vessels carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centres. Russia has run a strike campaign against Ukrainian data centres and telecom infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv. Some Ukrainian data centres suspended operations, one attack left 100,000 households briefly without internet, and Ukraine's digital minister told Reuters the country is moving digital infrastructure underground.

Moscow is hardening its own position. In August, President Vladimir Putin gave the state power to take control of critically important infrastructure judged poorly protected against drones. RBC reported that businesses are in talks with the government about building data centres in countries Moscow considers "friendly."

What is Yandex?

Yandex is Russia’s largest technology and AI company, often called 'Russia’s Google'. It launched Russia’s first search engine in 1997 and has since grown into a wide ecosystem. It has also built YandexGPT, one of Russia’s leading AI models, trained on supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips.

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