Ukraine is wiping out Russian data centers, setting its AI race back
Ukrainian FP-1 drones hit Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Kaluga on October 8–9, followed by strikes on a third Yandex site, Sberbank's Balakovo facility and a VKontakte data center — knocking out cloud, banking, e-commerce and AI services across Russia, with repairs expected to take months or years. Sasovo housed two of Yandex's three Nvidia-A100 supercomputers used to train YandexGPT, chips Russia cannot easily replace under sanctions. It matters because this is the first war to systematically target AI training infrastructure — a warning that AI's physical backbone is far more fragile than the software story suggests.
SOURCES
- Hacker News (AI)2026-10-23 09:15