Russia prides itself on its digital advancements – from a large e-commerce services sector to ambitious plans to develop artificial intelligence.
But now some of the key data centers at the heart of its technical prowess have been destroyed by Ukrainian drone attacks during the year. Large-scale invasion 4.5 years oldsuffering damage that could take a long time to repair.
Ukraine this month hit three major data centers owned by tech giant Yandex, one for Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, and one for social media platform VKontakte, the country’s equivalent of Facebook.
While Yandex, Sberbank and VKontakte remain coy about the damage, individuals and businesses across Russia have reported widespread disruptions to cloud services. Banking, e-commerce, location-based, and ride-hailing services, as well as Yandex’s virtual assistant Alisa and multi-modal AI chatbots, have all suffered lasting disruption.
The consequences even extended to the Russian judicial system, forcing arbitration courts to cancel or postpone sessions and cut off access to databases.
Most experts predict that repairing the damage could take months or even years. Some warn that Moscow’s aspirations to become a leader in AI development could be significantly reduced.
“This effectively puts Russia far behind in the AI race,” said Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society activist group.
Data centers were hit by both sides during the war
Data centers are the latest targets of air campaigns carried out by both sides against each other’s vital infrastructure.
Russian missiles and drones have struck Ukraine’s power grid and other key sites, part of the Kremlin’s efforts to weaken morale and resistance. Moscow has intensified its attacks as winter approaches, taking advantage of a shortage of Patriot interceptors supplied by the United States, whose stocks were emptied by Washington’s war against Iran.
Ukraine responded with waves of drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, triggering a massive oil crisis and bringing the war to millions of civilians.
US President Donald Trump blamed the attacks for higher global oil prices, which intensified largely because of the US war in Iran. Earlier this month, Trump reached a deal with President Vladimir Putin to import diesel, shocking Ukraine and its allies.
Ukraine also hit huge warehouses for Russia’s largest online retailers, Wild bays and Ozon.
kyiv’s attacks on Russian data centers followed closely on the heels of Moscow’s recent strikes on data centers in Ukraine, which disrupted the Internet and television broadcasts.
On October 8, Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo in the Ryazan region which is home to two of the company’s three supercomputers. A data center in Kaluga was hit a day later and that of Vladimir on October 11.
Sberbank’s data center and AI center was hit on October 14 in Balakovo, Saratov region, and four days later kyiv struck a data center in St. Petersburg serving VKontakte.
Data centers are vulnerable
While oil refineries and warehouses are easy prey, data centers are even more vulnerable targets: massive buildings filled with servers and supporting power and cooling infrastructure. Lasting damage can result from a drone carrying a relatively light load of explosives.
The vulnerability of data centers was revealed by Iran, whose drones hit two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain. AWS said last month that it was unable to restore access to resources and data hosted in two of them.
Yandex conducted drills to detect an accident that could knock out one of its six data centers, but it was caught off guard when its three key facilities were hit in four days. It was not immediately clear why air defenses near the sites had failed.
“The problem in Russia is that they have to cover a large country with air defense and they don’t have enough,” said Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group.
Russia’s Efforts to Build a ‘Sovereign Internet’ Backfire
Ukraine has stored critical data on servers in allied European countries, helping to limit the damage caused by Russian attacks. But Moscow strict digital sovereignty policy requires all data to be stored at home, making it extremely vulnerable.
“Since all the infrastructure and data are located in Russia, it is relatively easier to dismantle them,” Reiners said.
Klimarev predicted that attacks on data centers could encourage many large Russian companies to move their data abroad, while authorities could relax efforts to tighten controls on the internet to minimize the damage.
“Paradoxically, attacks on data centers saved the Russian Internet from isolation, because it will now have to move its computing resources, most likely to Europe,” Klimarev said. “It is highly likely that many Russian companies are now scouring the European market to rent IT assets.”
Russians unhappy with service interruptions
Yandex dominates digital life in Russia and many former Soviet countries. It offers a wide variety of functions, including a search engine, cloud storage, payment applications, geolocation and ride-sharing services, and e-commerce platforms.
“Yandex is a bit like Uber, Amazon and Google and everything rolled into one,” with everything “concentrated in a few data centers,” Reiners said. “From a strategic point of view, they are an excellent target.”
The attacks on Yandex caused unprecedented disruption, paralyzing payments, online orders, taxi rides and access to personal data.
Moscow resident Igor Mann said he could not recover an order he placed on Yandex Market, an e-commerce platform. He said he tried using a virtual private network, but “nothing worked.”
Taxi driver Pavel Belyavskiy, who receives orders through Yandex’s ride-sharing app, was unable to communicate with passengers.
“On several orders already, I ended up waiting a long time and had to cancel the ride because I couldn’t even contact the passenger,” he said.
The attacks also caused temporary disruptions at some large companies and banks that rely on Yandex cloud services.
“It’s not just a question of convenience, it’s also a question of work … linked to everyday life,” said another Moscow resident, Eduard Malyavko.
A blow to Russian AI ambitions
Yandex said it restored most key cloud services in the following days as it turned its attention to other data centers in Russia. But the damage to the company’s AI development efforts is widely seen as massive and lasting.
Yandex has invested in huge data centers as the global AI boom fuels demand for computing power. The company’s three supercomputers used to develop models are ranked among the top 500 in the world. Its most powerful computer, the one in the Sasovo data center, was ranked 19th.
Yandex did not reveal the extent of the impact of the strikes, but satellite images indicated that its data centers suffered serious damage. Some observers noted that the fires started by the attacks likely severely damaged high-end chips and other key equipment.
“With this kind of shock, it is difficult to hope that at least something remained intact: data center equipment is fragile, demanding and expensive,” Klimarev said. “Soot from fire is bad for electronics.”
While Russia is already several years behind the United States and China, “Ukrainian drone strikes will likely further dampen Russian AI efforts,” said Connor Martin, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He said in a commentary that Russia would likely struggle to quickly replace the American-designed Nvidia A100 chips that power Yandex’s supercomputers.
Klimarev also said the global shortage of high-end chips, combined with sanctions on their delivery to Russia, would make repairs lengthy and expensive.
“I’m not sure it can be done in six months, in a year, or even at all,” he said.
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Kelvin Chan in London and M Reo in Washington contributed.
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