Ukraine has struck a second data centre operated by Russian technology giant Yandex in two days, widening the war from energy and industrial targets into critical digital and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Yandex said its facility in Russia’s Kaluga region was hit by drones on October 9, leaving several data-centre modules completely disabled.
The attack came less than 24 hours after a separate strike seriously damaged Yandex’s Sasovo data centre in the Ryazan region and forced the entire facility offline.
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Kaluga Facility Partly Disabled
Yandex said part of the Kaluga site’s infrastructure was knocked out of service.
The company warned that some services could face disruption as engineers worked to assess the damage and reroute workloads.
Kaluga regional governor Vladislav Shapsha said nine people were injured in the wider drone attack on the region, although Yandex said none of its employees were hurt at either of the affected facilities.
The company has not yet given a timeline for full restoration.
Sasovo Attack Was More Serious
The previous day’s strike on Yandex’s Sasovo data centre caused a fire and forced the entire site to shut down.
Yandex said the facility was seriously damaged and it remained unclear whether the equipment could be fully restored.
The Sasovo hub is one of Yandex’s five major data centres.
It also houses two of the company’s three supercomputers used for AI development, making the site particularly important to its artificial intelligence operations.
Their condition has not been fully confirmed.
Two AI Supercomputers May Be Affected
The Sasovo data centre hosts Yandex supercomputers used to train and develop AI models.
That turns the strike into more than a conventional cloud outage.
Damage to those systems could affect the company’s ability to train large models, run research workloads and expand AI services.
Yandex has become one of Russia’s most important AI companies, developing search, cloud services, YandexGPT and other consumer and enterprise products.
The full impact on its AI infrastructure is still being assessed.
Businesses Are Already Feeling the Impact
The attacks have also affected companies that rely on Yandex Cloud.
Reuters reported that the dating platform Pulse lost access to its backup database after the disruptions.
Other Russian services, including Russian Railways and several online platforms, also reported technical problems around the same period, although not every outage has been directly attributed to the Yandex strikes.
Yandex operates a large ecosystem that includes search, maps, cloud computing, email, entertainment and business software.
That means damage to its infrastructure can extend beyond the company itself.
Ukraine Says Strikes Are Retaliation
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the expanding strikes as retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian digital infrastructure.
“We always respond symmetrically,” he said after Russia recently targeted Ukrainian server facilities and communications infrastructure.
Ukraine has increasingly used long-range drones against targets deep inside Russia, including refineries, industrial facilities and logistics infrastructure.
Data centres now appear to have joined that target list.
Digital Infrastructure Becomes a War Target
The two Yandex strikes mark a significant shift because data centres support both commercial and strategic technology.
They host cloud services, government and business systems, AI computing and large volumes of stored data.
Disabling a data centre can therefore create economic disruption without directly targeting traditional military infrastructure.
In the case of Yandex, the strategic value is even greater because the company is deeply involved in Russia’s AI development.
The attacks show how modern conflicts are increasingly targeting the physical infrastructure behind digital services.
Yandex Says Restoration Timeline Is Unclear
Yandex said emergency teams and company specialists were working at both sites.
The Sasovo facility remains completely shut down, while part of the Kaluga infrastructure is out of service.
The company said it was still assessing the condition of equipment and could not say when normal operations would resume.
Yandex shares fell more than 4% on the Moscow Exchange following news of the attacks.
What this means for you
The strikes show that data centres and AI infrastructure are becoming direct targets in modern warfare, not just supporting systems behind the scenes. For businesses relying heavily on one cloud or data-centre provider, the incident is another reminder that physical attacks can create the same kind of operational disruption as cyberattacks.
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