Yandex said drone strikes partly disabled its Kaluga data center and shut a major Sasovo facility housing two of its three AI-training supercomputers.
Ukrainian drone strikes partly disabled a Yandex data center in Russia’s Kaluga region and shut down a separate facility in Sasovo, according to reporting by Al Jazeera citing company statements and Reuters and AFP. The October 9 report said the Kaluga site was partly out of action after a strike, while an attack the previous day had halted operations at Sasovo.
The Sasovo facility housed two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models, the report said. Yandex described the attacks as affecting core operations and said its teams were working to keep services running and assist users affected by disruptions. The company operates a range of widely used digital services in Russia, so the incident raised concerns beyond AI training capacity alone.
The strikes mark a notable expansion of attacks on technology infrastructure during the Russia-Ukraine war. Al Jazeera reported that Russia had also struck data centers and telecommunications infrastructure in Ukraine in recent weeks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was responding to attacks on its own data centers, but did not provide operational details.
The immediate AI impact is difficult to quantify from the public information available. The report does not establish how much model training was interrupted, whether workloads could be transferred to other facilities, or how long services would be affected. It does, however, show that AI compute infrastructure can be exposed to physical risks alongside familiar concerns such as cyberattacks, power constraints and supply-chain disruption.
For companies that depend on large, concentrated computing sites, the episode highlights the importance of redundancy, recovery planning and geographic distribution. It also demonstrates that data centers used for commercial services and AI development can become strategically important infrastructure during conflict. Yandex’s public statements emphasized service continuity, while the full extent of damage and recovery timelines remained unclear at the time of publication.