What happened
Ukrainian drones hit a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, according to Reuters and Meduza. A large fire broke out and Yandex was forced to shut the facility down. Many services running on Yandex Cloud went offline after the strike.
Supercomputers at risk
The Sasovo site is one of Yandex's five major data centers and hosts tens of thousands of servers. It houses two of the company's three AI supercomputers: the Nvidia A100-based Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis was ranked the world's 19th most powerful supercomputer in the 2021 Top 500 list; its 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS would now place it around 101st. Western sanctions prevent Yandex from upgrading the system. Both machines have been used to train AI models, including YandexGPT. The third supercomputer, Galushkin, is located in Vladimir.
Service outages
Yandex has not said whether its supercomputers were affected, though the scale of the fire suggests their chances of survival are low. The company says key consumer services remained operational, but users reported problems with Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay and Market. According to Meduza, Cian, Litmarket, Russian Railways, Spartak Moscow, crypto exchange Rapira, Astral and 1C business solutions were also affected, along with corporate systems at T-Bank, Ozon and Wildberries. Russian outlets including RIA Novosti, Vesti and Interfax were down as well.
Why it matters
The strike deals a heavy blow to Russia's AI infrastructure, already constrained by restrictions on exports of advanced AI accelerators. If the machines are destroyed, Yandex may be forced to rely on Chinese infrastructure for future model training. The incident follows Russian strikes on Ukrainian telecom and computing facilities; since September 23, data centers belonging to at least eight Ukrainian companies have been damaged or destroyed.
