Ukraine hits Russian data centres in blow to Moscow's AI capabilities

Ukrainian drones struck five data centres belonging to Russia's largest technology companies in October, causing widespread failures in cloud services, payment systems and navigation apps nationwide. The Ukrainian armed forces hit three Yandex facilities: in Sasovo in the Ryazan region on 7 October, in Kaluga on 9 October, and in Vladimir on 11 October. On 14 October a Sber data centre in Balakovo in the Saratov region was struck, and on 18 October a VKontakte data centre in the Leningrad region near St Petersburg came under attack. Yandex, Sber and VKontakte together run much of Russia's consumer internet infrastructure, from taxi apps and card payment processing to cloud storage and messaging.