Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers on consecutive days in early October, first hitting the Sasovo facility in Russia's Ryazan region and then the company's largest facility in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow. Sasovo houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, named Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, built on Nvidia A100 chips and used to train YandexGPT; Yandex has declined to confirm whether the supercomputers were damaged. Ukrainian drone maker Firepoint said it used FP-1 one-way attack drones against the Kaluga site, and Kaluga Oblast governor Vladislav Shapsha reported nine people injured in the broader regional strike, though Yandex said no one was hurt at the data center itself. Downdetector logged more than 1,300 user reports tied to outages in Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents, and Yandex Tables, with Russian Railways, MegaFon, and several Russian media outlets that lease Yandex infrastructure also affected.
The strikes demonstrate that physical data center infrastructure is now a direct military target, not merely subject to chip-export restrictions, raising the security calculus for any operator planning facilities in or near conflict zones. A one-way attack drone costing far less than a single GPU rack was sufficient to disable modules at facilities supporting a national AI model, a precedent that will force insurers and developers globally to reassess physical-security risk in ways that were largely theoretical before these attacks.
A drone strike taking out supercomputers at major Russian tech company Yandex's data centers is a high-impact, novel infrastructure security story with geopolitical significance not previously covered in the Digest.