Ukraine hits Yandex AI data centres and Russian missile plants — SkimNews
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- Yandex confirmed its AI data centre in the Kaluga region was partly put out of action by Ukrainian drones on Friday, saying teams were working day and night to keep services running for Russians.
- A prior strike hit Yandex's Sasovo data hub in the Ryazan region, housing two of the three supercomputers used to train the company's AI models — a direct blow to Russia's AI development pipeline.
- Zelenskyy framed the campaign as retaliation: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion," citing Russia's ongoing strikes on Ukrainian data centres that left roughly 100,000 households temporarily without internet.
- Ukraine's General Staff said overnight strikes hit three missile-production sites, including a Tver region factory making missile components and a Nizhny Novgorod facility for disassembling intercontinental ballistic missiles, where one serviceman was killed repelling the attack.
- The Ukhta oil refinery, owned by state giant Lukoil and located 1,900km from the Ukrainian border, was also struck, part of Kyiv's effort to degrade Russia's economic capacity to wage war.
- Russia's air campaign continued hitting Ukrainian civilians — overnight strikes killed one and injured seven in Zaporizhzhia, while Moscow struck a Black Sea cargo vessel in Mykolaiv that it said was supplying the Ukrainian military.
Why it matters: Ukraine is escalating from energy and military logistics targets to hitting the data backbone of Russia's AI industry, with two of three Yandex supercomputers now disrupted. For Russia, losing AI-training capacity inside its own territory raises the long-run cost of waging war on compute-dependent systems; for Ukraine, the 'mirror-like' doctrine means every Russian strike on Ukrainian data centres invites a deeper counter-strike.
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