Ukraine's drone strikes spur hasty Russian plans for underground data centers
Ukrainian drone strikes damaged facilities housing AI supercomputers and disrupted cloud services for millions of Russian users, hitting data centers run by Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte and the Finance Ministry. Russia is now scrambling to harden its facilities: state telecom operator Rostelecom has discussed moving some data centers underground with mining company Norilsk, and a regional governor has proposed building them inside open-pit coal mines with green parks above as camouflage, while the Kremlin requires owners to reserve capacity for emergency state needs. This matters because data centers have become wartime targets, and protecting them is now a matter of national infrastructure resilience.
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- Ars Technica2026-11-03 20:39