Ukraine's Drone Strikes on Russian Data Centers Are Derailing Its AI Ambitions

Wars used to be fought over territory. This one is increasingly being fought over servers. This month, Ukrainian drones struck three main data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, one belonging to Russia's biggest bank Sberbank, and one belonging to the social network VKontakte — knocking out cloud services across Russia and, experts say, setting Moscow's artificial intelligence ambitions back by years. The Associated Press reported the full scale of the damage on October 22.

What was hit, and what broke

The strikes landed on October 8 and 9, when FP-1 one-way attack drones built by the Ukrainian firm Firepoint hit Yandex facilities in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions. The Sasovo site housed two of the company's three supercomputers used to train its YandexGPT models — its most powerful machine was ranked 19th in the world — while Kaluga was Yandex's largest data center. Two of Yandex's five data centers were destroyed or rendered inoperable in a two-day window.

The fallout spread far beyond one company. Banking, e-commerce, geolocation and ride-hailing services suffered lasting disruptions. Yandex's Alisa virtual assistant and its multimodal AI chatbots went down. The disruption even reached Russia's judicial system, reportedly forcing arbitration courts to cancel or postpone sessions and cutting database access. Satellite images showed serious damage, and experts say fires from the attacks probably destroyed high-end chips and other equipment that cannot be quickly replaced. "With this kind of hit, it's hard to expect that at least something was left intact — the data centres' equipment is fragile, demanding and expensive," said Mikhail Klimarev of the Internet Protection Society. "Soot from the fire is bad for electronics."

The AI race takes a physical hit

The strategic damage may outlast the service outages. Russia already lagged years behind the United States and China in AI, and the strikes hit the exact infrastructure its catch-up depended on: the supercomputers training its flagship models. "This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race," Klimarev said. Replacing the destroyed hardware looks brutally hard — the clusters ran on US-designed Nvidia A100 chips, and as Council on Foreign Relations expert Connor Martin noted, sanctions plus the global shortage of high-end chips will make repairs long and costly. "I'm not sure it can be done in half a year, a year, or even at all," Klimarev added.

Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy framed the strikes as a "symmetrical response" to a Russian drone campaign that has been targeting Ukrainian data centers since late September — the latest front in a war where, as we reported earlier this month, data centers have formally joined power plants and refineries on the target list. Meanwhile Moscow has stepped up attacks on Ukraine's power grid as winter approaches, exploiting a shortage of US-supplied Patriot interceptors whose stockpiles have been drained by Washington's war with Iran. Both sides now treat the other's digital infrastructure as fair game — and the lesson for every other country watching is that in the AI era, the most valuable military targets may be buildings full of servers.

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