Ukrainian Drone Strike Hits Yandex Data Center Housing Russian AI Supercomputers

A Ukrainian drone strike hit a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, triggering a large fire and prompting the company to shut down the facility, according to reporting by Reuters and Meduza cited by Tom's Hardware. Numerous services running on Yandex Cloud went offline after the attack.

The Record from Recorded Future News reported that the strike caused significant disruption to the Russian technology company's network, with connectivity dropping to roughly 70 percent of normal levels.

The Sasovo site is one of Yandex's five major data centers and holds tens of thousands of servers. Among them are two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis, described as Yandex's most powerful system, was ranked 19th on the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers in 2021. Its performance of 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS would place it around 101st on the current list, and Western sanctions prevent Yandex from upgrading the system.