Ukraine’s drone strikes have disabled three of Russia’s largest data centers, including those housing Yandex’s supercomputers used for AI training. The attacks, which occurred in late September and early October, have caused widespread outages in Russia’s digital services, according to reports from pro-Kremlin bloggers.
The first strike on October 8 damaged a data center in Sasovo, which houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used for training its YandexGPT AI model. The second strike on October 9 knocked out another Yandex data center in Kaluga, one of the largest in Russia with a maximum 63-megawatt capacity.
A third strike on October 11 forced Yandex to suspend operations at its Vladimir data center, which houses the third of its three supercomputers. These supercomputers, including the Chervonenkis and Lyapunov models, are rated at 29.42 and 20.03 petaflops respectively, and rank 101 and 161 on the Top 500 list.
"Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created that had long been one of Russia’s advantages compared to even Western countries, has proven to be a weak link—primarily due to hyper-centralization," warned a Russian milblogger, according to a post translated by ChrisO_wiki. The damage has disrupted Russian payment apps, digital banking services, and cloud computing for major companies.
The damage to Yandex’s data centers has also impacted its cloud computing service, which hosts some of Russia’s largest companies. The repairs may take up to six months, according to an unnamed IT expert, due to the lack of backup infrastructure outside Russia.
Source: arstechnica
