// ARS TECHNICA — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine
Russian bloggers warn Russia’s hyper-centralized digital economy is vulnerable.
When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.
Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks.
But Ukraine soon began striking back at data centers owned by the Russian company Yandex, also known as “Russia’s Google,” in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as a “symmetrical response.”
The first Ukrainian drone attack damaged a data center in the Sasovo region southeast of Moscow on October 8, which houses two of the three supercomputers that Yandex has used to train its YandexGPT AI model.
It was not immediately clear how much damage may have occurred to the supercomputers, which are based on Nvidia A100 GPU chips. The Chervonenkis supercomputer has a computing performance rated at 29.42 petaflops and ranks at 101 on the Top 500 List of supercomputers, while the Lyapunov supercomputer is rated at 20.03 petaflops and ranks at 161.
A second Ukrainian drone strike knocked out another Yandex data center in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow on October 9. This is one of the largest data centers in Russia, with a maximum 63-megawatt capacity.
A third Ukrainian drone strike then forced Yandex to suspend operations at its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, on October 11, according to BBC News. This facility houses the third of Yandex’s three supercomputers, Galushkin, which ranked 134 on the Top 500 list and is rated at 20.64 petaflops of computing performance.
More importantly for Russian society, the damage to Yandex’s data centers has reportedly caused interruptions or outages to popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map services. Yandex’s search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia.