Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out an AI data center belonging to Yandex, described as "Russia's Google". One damaged data center had supercomputers used for training Yandex's AI model.
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The strike on Yandex's AI data center is part of a broader pattern in 2026 of data centers becoming wartime targets. In February, after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Iranian drones knocked out multiple Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The Yandex strike fits into Ukraine's wider drone campaign, which has focused on Russian military bases and supply lines, Russian-linked shipping in the Sea of Azov and Black Sea, and Russian energy infrastructure such as oil refineries. In the summer of 2026, Ukraine also targeted warehouses belonging to Wildberries and Ozon, Russia's Amazon equivalents. Meanwhile, Russia has regularly launched mass missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities, hitting power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs and residential buildings since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ukraine has recently faced a shortage of interceptor weapons capable of shooting down Russian missiles and jet-powered drones, while gradually ramping up its own medium- and long-range drone strike campaign. The conflict also showed signs of widening beyond Ukraine: coordinated aerial and sea drone strikes sank two commercial ships in the Black Sea on October 5 and October 6, within the exclusive economic zones of NATO members Romania and Bulgaria. Ukraine's president Zelenskyy attributed those attacks to Russia.
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