Drones Take Out a Third Yandex Data Centre in a Week, Hitting the Hardware Behind Russia's AI Push

Yandex is often called Russia's Google, and it is deeply involved in the country's AI development. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that Ukraine always responds in kind and that he could not share all the details, Al Jazeera noted. The same report says Russia has struck Ukrainian data centres and telecom sites in the past month, including in central Kyiv.

Did the strikes really cut Russian bot activity?

Within a day the outages became a political argument. Euronews reported that Cloudflare Radar data shows automated traffic from Yandex's network fell about 94 per cent on Sunday against its average in the second half of September. Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, Zelenskyy said social media had become less hostile since the strikes, with fewer provocations because there were fewer bots.

The data does not prove that, and Euronews says as much. The figure includes legitimate automated traffic such as search-engine crawlers, so it does not show whether Kremlin-linked social media bots were affected. The outlet also notes that similar claims about reduced activity for specific parties in Germany, Britain and the United States have circulated, but no independently verified figures for Germany have been published. The Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky questioned the timing on X, while the debate lands weeks before US midterm elections amid worries about foreign interference.

What does it mean for AI?

Whatever the effect on online chatter, the physical effect is easier to read. Training and running large models needs concentrated power, cooling and racks, and Yandex has now lost the site that held two of its three training supercomputers, plus two others. Reports differ on the capacity of the Vladimir facility, so I have left the figures out. What is clear is that data centres have become targets on both sides of the war. The next question is whether Moscow can harden them quickly enough, and whether Yandex can move its workloads before another site goes dark.