Ukraine strikes Yandex AI data infrastructure in Russia as campaign widens
Ukrainian drone strikes have partly disabled a Yandex data centre in Russia's Kaluga region, according to the company. The attack came a day after a separate strike shut down another major Yandex data hub in Sasovo in the Ryazan region. Together, the incidents suggest the campaign is widening from industrial and energy targets to technology infrastructure linked to artificial intelligence.
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Yandex said the Kaluga site, southwest of Moscow, was hit by drones and partly put out of action. It also said the earlier strike in Sasovo affected a major hub where two of the company's three supercomputers used to develop AI models are housed. The company said its teams were working to keep services running and help those affected, but acknowledged that the attacks had struck at the core of its operations.
The strikes matter because Yandex is one of Russia's largest technology companies and its services are widely used by consumers and businesses. The company operates under close government observation and plays a central role in Russia's AI development efforts. Any disruption to its data centres can affect service reliability, cloud operations and wider digital continuity, even if some services remain available.
The attacks also fit into a broader exchange of strikes on infrastructure tied to the war. Russia has hit several Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications facilities in recent weeks, including targets in central Kyiv, causing temporary internet outages for about 100,000 households. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that Kyiv responds in a mirror-like fashion, adding that Russia has been hitting Ukrainian data centres and that Ukraine is responding, although he did not give details.
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Ukraine has also continued to target Russian missile production and energy infrastructure, saying these sites help sustain Moscow's air campaign and war economy. In the same period, Ukraine's military said it had hit three facilities involved in missile production across Russia overnight, including a factory in the Tver region. The focus on digital infrastructure marks an expansion of that pressure campaign into a sector that supports both civilian services and strategic technology development.
What remains unclear is the full scale of the damage at the Kaluga and Sasovo sites and how long any disruption will last. Yandex has not provided a complete technical assessment or recovery timetable, and it is not clear whether there were any injuries. The key question now is whether these strikes represent a sustained shift toward Russia's data infrastructure or a limited extension of the wider cross-border campaign.
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