A second Ukrainian drone strike hit a Yandex data center in the Kaluga region on October 9, one day after the initial attack on the company's Sasovo facility, knocking out two of the Russian tech giant's five data centers and degrading its ability to run its YandexGPT AI model and other online services2.
The escalation extends the damage reported in Vector Wire's prior coverage of the October 8 Sasovo strike[1]. That first attack caused a fire, forced a full operational shutdown of the Sasovo facility, and marked the first major kinetic hit on a Russian data hub since the war began1,3. The second strike targeted Yandex's Kaluga data center, which Ars Technica described as the company's largest such facility.
AI training hardware in the blast radius
The Sasovo data center houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers used for training YandexGPT, the generative AI model that Yandex developed as the region's leading large language model. With that facility offline and the Kaluga center also struck, Yandex is "struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services," according to Ars Technica. Yandex told CNBC that some services may be unavailable to users but said no employees were hurt.
The Ukrainian company Firepoint said its FP-1 one-way attack drones were involved in the Kaluga strike, according to Reuters.
Tit-for-tat on data infrastructure
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy framed the strikes as retaliation. "We continue to respond to Russia's attacks on Ukraine, and we're doing so with high precision," Zelenskyy said in a post on X. "Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response". The Ukrainian attacks followed a Russian drone campaign targeting Ukraine's own data centers since late September, which has disrupted mobile phone and internet services for thousands of Ukrainians.
ANALYSIS The loss of two out of five data centers, including the site housing two of three AI-training supercomputers, concentrates Yandex's remaining compute capacity into a smaller, potentially more vulnerable footprint. The episode establishes data centers, and the AI workloads they carry, as active military targets on both sides of the conflict.