Ukrainian strikes knocked out three major Yandex data centers in Russia

Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of Yandex’s largest data centers in Russia within several days. The attacks triggered widespread outages in Russian digital services.

The first strike damaged a data center in the Sasovo region southeast of Moscow on October 8. The facility houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex used to train its YandexGPT artificial-intelligence model.

The extent of the damage to the supercomputers has not been established. They use Nvidia A100 graphics processors: Chervonenkis is rated at 29.42 petaflops, while Lyapunov is rated at 20.03 petaflops.

Russian digital services face outages

Pro-Kremlin bloggers warned that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse if the two countries continue trading strikes against infrastructure. In posts translated by independent researcher ChrisO_wiki, they also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient.

Russia began a drone campaign against Ukrainian data centers and mobile networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted internet and cellular service for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv and formed part of a broader campaign against power infrastructure, transport hubs and residential buildings.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the strikes on Yandex facilities as a “symmetrical response.” Chervonenkis ranks 101st and Lyapunov 161st on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.