Ukrainian drones set a Yandex data center ablaze, and the fire may have taken out two of Russia's most powerful AI supercomputers along with it.
The drones struck Yandex's facility in Sasovo, a site built on a former machine-tool factory that itself sits under Western sanctions for supplying Russian defense manufacturers. The blaze forced Yandex to shut the facility down, and Yandex Cloud customers were told to switch to other zones. The data center reportedly holds two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers, Chervonenkis and Lyapunov, both used to train YandexGPT, Russia's leading large language model. Yandex has not said whether the machines survived, but the scale of the fire makes that look unlikely.
This matters because Yandex cannot simply replace these systems. Western export controls already bar it from buying new Nvidia hardware, so losing Chervonenkis and Lyapunov would strip away irreplaceable compute and likely push the company toward Chinese chips for future model training.
The outage rippled well beyond AI research, taking down Yandex Mail, Disk, Pay, and Market along with services at T-Bank, Ozon, Wildberries, and several state media outlets. Russia hit Ukrainian data centers with missiles earlier this month, so call this retaliation in kind, just delivered with more precision than either side's formal sanctions regime has managed.