Yandex, Russia's largest technology company, confirmed on Friday that a drone strike disabled several modules at its data center in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow. This incident marks the second drone attack on a Yandex data center within two days, following a strike on its Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region the previous day. The Sasovo center houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex employs for training its artificial intelligence models.
The company stated that the Kaluga attack "completely knocked out several modules" of the data center and warned of potential disruptions to some Yandex services. Yandex shares fell approximately 4% on the Moscow Exchange after news of the second strike. The Kaluga data center, located in the Grabtsevo Industrial Park, was designed to be Yandex's largest in terms of server rack capacity and one of Russia's biggest, covering 130,000 square meters with a designed capacity of 63 megawatts.
The attacks on Yandex's infrastructure come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that Ukraine would retaliate for Russian strikes on its own data centers. "We always respond symmetrically," Zelensky said on Thursday. Russia has recently intensified its long-range strike campaign against Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure, aiming to disrupt Ukraine's economy.
The strike on the Sasovo data center in the Ryazan region caused a fire and forced the suspension of operations at the facility, taking tens of thousands of servers offline. This outage led to reported disruptions for various Yandex services and other platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure, including Russian Railways, telecom operator MegaFon, and several Russian media outlets.
Yandex described its data centers as the "iron heart" of the company, emphasizing their critical role in supporting services that have become integral to daily life for millions of Russians. The company stated that its teams are working to restore services and assess the full extent of the damage, though it could not confirm when the affected equipment would be fully operational again. Western sanctions and export controls on Russia may complicate Yandex's ability to replace advanced semiconductors damaged in the attacks.
The Kaluga region governor, Vladislav Shapsha, reported that Ukrainian drones attacked the regional capital and several nearby districts, injuring nine people and damaging infrastructure. He did not specifically comment on the Yandex data center. Russian authorities claimed to have intercepted 26 drones over the region.
These drone strikes on Yandex facilities represent an expansion of Ukraine's military campaign, which has also targeted Russian energy infrastructure, including oil refineries. The attacks on Yandex’s AI data infrastructure highlight the increasing role of digital systems as targets in the ongoing conflict.