Ukrainian drone strikes in October knocked out three Yandex data centers, two of which house supercomputers used to train YandexGPT, according to Ars Technica. The first strike hit a data center in Sasovo on October 8 that houses two of the three supercomputers; later strikes hit Kaluga and Vladimir. The supercomputers—Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin—are rated between 20 and 29 petaflops and appear on the Top500 list.
The damage has rippled through Russia's digital economy. Yandex's search engine holds about 70% of the Russian market, and its cloud service supports large retailers and food chains. Outages have affected payment apps, email, e-commerce, streaming, ride-hailing, and navigation. Russian military bloggers cited by researcher ChrisO_wiki argue that Yandex's hyper-centralized infrastructure is a wartime weakness.
Russia's ability to build backup capacity is limited by its 2019 Sovereign Internet Law, which restricts use of foreign infrastructure, and by sanctions. Ukraine, by contrast, has moved services underground or abroad, with Microsoft and Amazon providing free cloud hosting. AWS alone hosts over 15 petabytes of data from Ukrainian government organizations and the energy company DTEK. The contrast suggests decentralization is a resilience advantage in this conflict.