'This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race': Ukraine is wiping out data centers across the border

Russia likes to talk up its digital muscle. Ukraine has now punched a hole straight through it. A string of drone strikes this month hit data centers tied to Yandex, Sberbank and VKontakte, and the fallout rippled from cloud services to banking, ride-hailing and even court systems.

The damage landed in a very specific way. Yandex said three of its data centers were struck over four days in October, including sites that housed two of its three supercomputers. Sberbank’s AI hub was hit on Oct. 14, and a VKontakte-serving center in St. Petersburg was struck four days later. People across Russia reported broken cloud access, failed payments, disrupted online orders and taxi rides, and some arbitration courts had to cancel or delay sessions.

That matters because these are not just generic server rooms. Data centers are dense with servers, power gear and cooling systems, which makes them vulnerable to a drone carrying a relatively small explosive load. Yandex had run drills for a failure at one of its six data centers, but it was caught off guard when three key facilities were hit in quick succession. Experts quoted in the report say repairs could take months, and maybe years.

The bigger problem is that Russia has boxed itself in. Ukraine has backed critical data up in allied European countries, but Moscow’s digital sovereignty policy keeps data at home, which makes it easier to knock out. That could push Russian companies to move computing abroad and blunt the Kremlin’s push for a tighter, more isolated internet. It also hits Russia’s AI ambitions where they actually live: in chips, servers and the boring infrastructure everyone ignores until it’s on fire.