Drone strike shuts a third Yandex data center, taking YandexGPT offline
Russia's largest tech company is learning what the AI era's infrastructure war looks like from the receiving end — three data centers in four days, and with them much of the cloud layer Russian businesses run on.
A Ukrainian drone strike knocked out Yandex's data center in Vladimir early Sunday morning, the third of the company's facilities hit since October 8. The site — reported at roughly 50 MW and designed for about 2,880 server racks — stopped operating completely after the attack, Yandex confirmed. The outage cascaded: more than 80 services across Yandex Cloud went down, and users reported banking and taxi apps failing across the country, with YandexPay, YandexGo, YandexMusic and YandexTaxi among the services knocked offline. Network monitor NetBlocks said its metrics showed a second collapse of Yandex's networks following the strike, on top of the drop recorded after the earlier attacks.
The AI damage is the part that matters here. YandexGPT and other Yandex AI services were disrupted along with the consumer apps, and the earlier strike on the Sasovo facility hit a site that houses two of the three supercomputers the company uses to develop its AI models. Yandex is the closest thing Russia has to a national champion in foundation models; losing supercomputer capacity and cloud capacity in the same week is not an outage you route around by the next morning. There is a stranger footnote too: after the earlier strikes, tracking of Russian disinformation bot traffic originating from Yandex's networks fell to near zero overnight — an unplanned side effect of infrastructure damage that analysts openly noted.
What to watch: whether Yandex can restore AI training capacity from surviving sites, and whether military planners on both sides now treat AI data centers — not just grids and comms — as primary targets. As we wrote when the Iran war forced the Gulf to rethink where compute gets built — Iran war forces UAE to redraw its 5GW AI data center map — the geography of AI infrastructure is now a strategic question, not a real-estate one.
Is physical destruction the most underestimated risk to AI capacity right now — bigger than chips, power, or regulation? Tell us in the comments.
