Ukrainian Drones Disable Yandex AI Data Centers in Russia

Ukrainian drones struck two of Yandex’s five Russian data centers on October 8 and 9, damaging facilities in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions that housed supercomputers training the YandexGPT large language model. President Zelenskyy called the strikes a symmetrical response to Russian drone attacks on Ukrainian data infrastructure in late September. The outages disrupted Yandex services and cascaded to Russian banking, rail, streaming, and other platforms reliant on the centers.