Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Yandex data centers housing two top supercomputers

Ukrainian drones hit a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, causing a massive fire and forcing the company to shut down the facility, according to Reuters and Meduza. Many services using Yandex Cloud are down following the attack. The site reportedly houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development, though it remains unclear whether the systems sustained any damage, as for now their fate is unclear. Russian missiles struck Ukrainian digital infrastructure earlier this month.

The Sasovo facility, one of Yandex's five major data centers, accommodates tens of thousands of servers, including two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis, the company's most powerful system, was once ranked as the world's 19 th most powerful supercomputer in the Top 500 list in 2021, but by today's standards its 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS is enough only for the 101 st place in the list. Due to Western sanctions, Yandex can no longer upgrade the system. …