Key information
Ukrainian drones recently struck a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, triggering a massive fire and forcing a facility shutdown. According to Reuters and Meduza, the site houses two of the company's three primary supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development. While the status of these systems remains unconfirmed, the scale of the fire suggests a low probability of survival.
The Sasovo facility contains tens of thousands of servers, including the Nvidia A100-based supercomputers Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis, once ranked 19th globally in 2021, currently holds the 101st position with 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS. Due to Western sanctions, Yandex cannot upgrade these systems, which are essential for training models like YandexGPT.
The attack caused widespread disruptions across Yandex Cloud and various consumer services, including Yandex Mail, Disk, and Market. Reports indicate that corporate systems for T-Bank, Ozon, and Wildberries, alongside several media outlets and business solutions, also faced outages. Detector404 recorded 58,268 complaints within a 24-hour period following the incident.
This event follows a series of Russian strikes against Ukrainian digital infrastructure since September 23, which impacted at least eight companies. If the Yandex supercomputers are permanently lost, the company may be forced to rely on Chinese infrastructure for future AI training, as current export restrictions severely limit access to advanced hardware.
