Drone strikes hit three Yandex data centers in four days, disrupting Russia’s leading AI model
Russian tech giant Yandex said Ukrainian drone strikes hit three of its data centers between October 8 and October 11. The first, in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, started a fire and forced the site to shut down. It houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to train its YandexGPT language model. The Moscow Times called it the first confirmed strike on Russian data infrastructure since the 2022 invasion.
On Friday, a strike on the Kaluga data center disabled several modules, and the regional governor said nine people were injured. On Sunday, Yandex said it had suspended its Vladimir site. Reports say enterprise customers lost access to some Yandex Cloud services, including the YandexGPT programming interface, and that Yandex couldn’t confirm it could restore equipment at Sasovo.
The strikes follow weeks of Russian attacks on data centers in Kyiv, which Moscow said processed military intelligence. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the Yandex strikes as a symmetrical response.
Sources: The Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, SOFX. Illustration is original artwork and free to use. Paraphrased from the linked reports.
