Explainer

What happens when Ukrainian drones strike Russia's digital heart?

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A nighttime drone strike triggered a fire at a Yandex facility in Sasovo, forcing the Russian tech giant to halt all operations at one of its primary server locations.

Western Russia

Sasovo

Yandex operates just three supercomputers to train its artificial intelligence models, and two of those machines are housed inside the stricken facility.

AI supercomputers

3

= 1 supercomputer

  • at Sasovo2

It followed Russian strikes on Ukrainian data networks and came days after Volodymyr Zelensky warned, "Do they really think we won't respond?"

“Do they really think we won't respond?”

Volodymyr Zelensky

As several Russian online services and news sites reported disruptions, the tech company said it was still uncertain if hardware could be restored: "The scale of the damage to the infrastructure is still being assessed."

“The scale of the damage to the infrastructure is still being assessed.”

Yandex

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Drones halt Yandex's Vladimir data center, its third attack in a weekRead the article

Thread: The war in Ukraine and its limits

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