Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Yandex data centers housing two top supercomputers

Ukrainian drones hit a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, causing a massive fire and forcing the company to shut down the facility, according to Reuters and Meduza. Many services using Yandex Cloud are down following the attack. The site reportedly houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development, though it remains unclear whether the systems sustained any damage, as for now their fate is unclear. Russian missiles struck Ukrainian digital infrastructure earlier this month.

The Sasovo facility, one of Yandex's five major data centers, accommodates tens of thousands of servers, including two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis, the company's most powerful system, was once ranked as the world's 19^th most powerful supercomputer in the Top 500 list in 2021, but by today's standards its 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS is enough only for the 101^st place in the list. Due to Western sanctions, Yandex can no longer upgrade the system. Both machines have been used to train AI models, including YandexGPT, Russia's leading large language model. Yandex's third supercomputer, Galushkin, is located in Vladimir.

So far, the company has not disclosed whether its supercomputers were affected by the strike, though judging by the massive fire caused by the drone incident, the systems' chances of survival are low. The potential damage to Nvidia-powered computing infrastructure could be extremely painful for Russia's AI industry, which is already constrained by restrictions on exports of advanced AI accelerators and servers to Russia. If the machines are indeed destroyed or damaged, many of its elements may be lost forever, and Yandex will be forced to use Chinese infrastructure for future model training.

The attack also disrupted Yandex Cloud infrastructure, so the company is recommending customers use alternative zones. Although Yandex claims that its key consumer services remained operational, users reported problems with Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay, and Market. Other affected services reportedly included Cian, Litmarket, Russian Railways, Spartak Moscow, cryptocurrency exchange Rapira, Astral, and the 1C business solutions. Corporate systems operated by T-Bank, Ozon, and Wildberries also experienced disruptions, according to Meduza. A Moscow-region bus operator suspended online ticket sales, while Detector404 registered 58,268 complaints over 24 hours. Many Russian media outlets, including state propaganda RIA Novosti, Vesti, and Interfax, were also down following the attack on 'infrastructure partner,' reports RBC.

It is noteworthy that the Yandex data center occupies former premises of the Sasta machine-tool factory, where Yandex established operations in 2014. Sasta manufactures industrial equipment supplied to various Russian manufacturers, including defense-related enterprises, and is therefore under Western sanctions. Regional authorities reported a fire at an industrial facility following the attack, but it remains unknown whether the intended target was the factory or Yandex's computing infrastructure. Still, no matter the target, Ukraine's sanctions against Russia's economy and military complex seem to be generally more efficient than those imposed by the West.

The incident follows Russian strikes against Ukrainian telecommunications and computing facilities. Since September 23, attacks have damaged or destroyed data centers that belong to at least eight Ukrainian companies, including Virtual Systems, MiroHost, CosmoNova, DataGroup, and CityHost. Among other websites, popular torrent trackers 1337x and NordicQuality temporarily went offline after servers that hosted them were damaged.

Ukraine is consequently moving some digital infrastructure underground, while Russian businesses are discussing deployments in countries considered friendly by Moscow, which is probably limited to just a few states, including China.