Drone strike on Yandex data center in Russia takes major AI infrastructure offline
A Ukrainian drone attack on a Yandex facility in Sasovo has knocked out services across the company's cloud platform and threatens two of Russia's most powerful supercomputers used for artificial intelligence research.
Ukrainian unmanned aircraft struck a significant Yandex data center located in Sasovo, Russia, triggering a large fire and prompting the technology company to take the facility offline, according to reporting by Reuters and Meduza. The attack has left numerous services dependent on Yandex Cloud unavailable to users. Two of Yandex's three supercomputers dedicated to artificial intelligence work are believed to be housed at the site, though the extent of any damage to these systems remains uncertain at this time.
The Sasovo installation represents one of five primary data center locations operated by Yandex and contains tens of thousands of servers. Among its equipment are two supercomputers built on Nvidia A100 processors, designated Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis stands as Yandex's most capable system; it achieved a ranking of 19th globally on the Top 500 supercomputer list in 2021, though its performance of 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS now places it at 101st on that same ranking. Western sanctions have prevented Yandex from enhancing this infrastructure further. Both machines have supported the development of AI models, including YandexGPT, which represents Russia's most prominent large language model. A third supercomputer operated by Yandex, named Galushkin, operates from a separate location in Vladimir.