Yandex says drones hit two of its data centres in two days, including the site it said in 2021 hosted two of its AI supercomputers

Drone attacks have hit two of Yandex's data centres in two days, stopping one and partly disabling the other, the Russian technology and AI company said on Friday 9 October 2026, in a Telegram post and a statement to Interfax reported by The Moscow Times: its Sasovo site in the Ryazan region on the night of 7 to 8 October, and its site in Kaluga on the morning of 9 October. Reuters described the first as the first major attack on a Russian data hub since the start of the war with Ukraine.

What Yandex says

In the Telegram post, signed by the Yandex team, the company said (our translation from the Russian) that the Sasovo data centre was seriously damaged by a drone attack and its operation completely stopped, that part of the infrastructure in Kaluga had gone out of service, and that no employees were hurt at either site. It said it was still assessing the infrastructure and that it was very difficult so far to give timelines for restoring the equipment.

• Sasovo, 8 October. Reuters reported that Yandex said the attack caused a fire and forced it to suspend operations at the site, one of its five large data centres, which hosts tens of thousands of servers. Later that day Yandex said, in a statement quoted by Reuters: "For the moment, we cannot confirm whether it is possible to restore the data centre equipment in Sasovo."
• Kaluga, 9 October. The Moscow Times reported that Yandex told the Interfax news agency: "Several data center modules are completely disabled," and warned that some services may be disrupted.

The supercomputers

Reuters reported that Yandex said in 2021 that the Sasovo hub hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT model. Yandex declined to say whether the supercomputers were affected, according to Reuters. Meduza named the two machines as "Lyapunov" and "Chervonenkis", and said the third, "Galushkin", is in Vladimir.

Disruption

Reuters reported that Yandex said its core consumer services were not affected, while Yandex Cloud advised customers of problems with the electricity supply to one data centre "zone". Reuters listed technical problems at other Russian sites on 8 October, including the property portal Cian and Russian Railways, and said Yandex shares fell 3% on the Moscow Exchange. DatacenterDynamics reported that the Sasovo centre sits in the Sasta production complex, which it said serves the Russian defence industry among others. Meduza said it was unclear whether the plant or the data centre was the intended target.

What each side has said

• Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday, as quoted by Al Jazeera: "You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding. I can't share all the details." The Record reported on 8 October that Ukraine's military had not publicly commented on the strike, and we found no General Staff or SBU statement naming either Yandex site.
• Russia. Meduza reported that Russia's Defence Ministry claimed the Ukrainian data centres it has struck since late September "provide for the processing and transmission of intelligence data in the interests of the Ukrainian Armed Forces." The Moscow Times reported the ministry as saying its air defences intercepted 505 Ukrainian drones overnight, in its report on Friday. We found no ministry statement addressing the Yandex sites.

Reuters also reported that Russia has carried out a strike campaign on Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications over the past month, and that one attack left 100,000 households with temporary internet outages.

Why it matters

On our reading, these strikes test a question that has mostly been theoretical: whether the computers used to train AI models become military targets once a state treats them as part of its strategic capacity. Yandex runs YandexGPT, which Reuters calls one of Russia's leading AI models, and Reuters reported that Sberbank says Russian AI developers lag their US and Chinese counterparts by six to nine months, with difficulties importing advanced chips because of sanctions seen as the main bottleneck. On our reading, a supercomputer built on imported Nvidia chips would be harder to replace than ordinary server capacity under those conditions, though Yandex has not said whether the machines were damaged.

For the UK, the government designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure on 12 September 2024, saying the move would give the sector government support in recovering from and anticipating critical incidents. The announcement's examples included outages, cyber attacks, adverse weather and IT blackouts; it does not mention military attack. On our reading, the Yandex strikes show that a data centre can also be a target in a war, a risk the announcement did not name.