Ukrainian drones struck a major Yandex data center in the town of Sasovo, Russia, triggering a massive fire that forced the company to shut down the facility. The attack has caused widespread disruptions to Yandex Cloud services and potentially damaged critical artificial intelligence infrastructure, according to reports from Reuters and Meduza.
The Sasovo site is one of five major data centers operated by the Russian tech giant. It houses tens of thousands of servers, including two of Yandex’s three primary supercomputers. These systems, powered by Nvidia A100 chips, are essential for training large language models such as YandexGPT, Russia’s leading AI platform.
Supercomputers Chervonenkis and Lyapunov at Risk
The facility contains two specific supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis was once ranked as the 19th most powerful supercomputer in the world in 2021. While its current performance of 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS places it lower on modern rankings, it remains a vital asset for Yandex’s AI development.
Western sanctions have prevented Yandex from upgrading these systems with newer hardware. If the drones caused significant damage to the Nvidia-based infrastructure, the loss could be permanent. Russia’s AI industry is already constrained by restrictions on the export of advanced accelerators. Replacing the destroyed components would likely require sourcing equipment from China, a shift that could complicate future model training efforts.
Yandex has not confirmed whether the supercomputers were damaged. The third supercomputer, Galushkin, is located in Vladimir and was not affected by this strike. However, the intensity of the fire at the Sasovo site suggests that the survival of the systems housed there is unlikely.
Widespread Service Disruptions Across Russia
The attack on the Yandex data center had immediate ripple effects across the Russian digital economy. Yandex Cloud, which provides infrastructure for many other businesses, experienced significant outages. The company advised customers to switch to alternative service zones to maintain connectivity.
While Yandex claimed its core consumer services remained operational, users reported failures across multiple platforms. Services including Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay, and Market faced disruptions. The outage also impacted third-party services that rely on Yandex infrastructure, such as the real estate site Cian, the online marketplace Litmarket, and the cryptocurrency exchange Rapira.
Major Russian corporations and media outlets were also affected. Corporate systems operated by T-Bank, Ozon, and Wildberries experienced issues. State-aligned media outlets including RIA Novosti, Vesti, and Interfax went offline. The disruption was so severe that a bus operator in the Moscow region suspended online ticket sales, and the cybersecurity firm Detector404 registered over 58,000 complaints within 24 hours.
The target of the strike remains a point of interest. The data center occupies former premises of the Sasta machine-tool factory, which manufactures industrial equipment for Russian defense enterprises. Sasta is under Western sanctions. Regional authorities reported a fire at an industrial facility, but it is unclear if the drones targeted the factory or the computing infrastructure directly.
This incident follows a series of Russian strikes against Ukrainian digital infrastructure. Since late September, Russian missiles have damaged data centers belonging to at least eight Ukrainian companies. In response, Ukraine is moving some of its own digital infrastructure underground, while Russian businesses are exploring deployment options in countries friendly to Moscow.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
