🇿🇦 English, 9 October 2026, cyberwarfare
Ukraine Strikes Yandex Data Centres, Disrupting AI Development
Ukraine's attacks on Russian data centres, including Yandex's AI training facilities, widen the conflict's digital front.
Yandex, a Russian technology company heavily involved in AI development, has been hit by Ukrainian drone attacks on its data centres. The attacks have partially disabled one data centre and shut down a major data hub housing two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used to train its AI model. The supercomputers, built around Nvidia A100 chips, are used to develop Yandex’s large language model, YandexGPT.
The attacks have disrupted Yandex’s operations, with the company trying to keep its services running despite the damage. Yandex has five data centres, with two of them now hit by Ukrainian attacks. The company has declined to confirm whether the supercomputers were affected by the attack.
The conflict’s digital front has expanded, with both Russia and Ukraine using drone attacks to target each other’s infrastructure, including data centres, energy facilities, and e-commerce warehouses.