Ukraine attacks Sber, Yandex data centres in drone campaign on Russia's AI

Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian data centres has hit at least five computing sites belonging to Yandex, Sberbank and VKontakte this month, and reports published on October 22 and 23, 2026 say the attacks are disrupting services and setting back Russia's artificial intelligence work. The searches behind "Ukraine attacks Sber data centre" refer to the October 14 strike on a Sberbank facility in Balakovo, in Russia's Saratov region, one of a series that began with Yandex sites on October 8. President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the strikes as retaliation for Russian missile attacks on server facilities in Kyiv.

Most strikes in this war have targeted military sites, energy plants and refineries. Data centres are a newer kind of target. They hold the computers that run banking apps, search engines, maps, cloud services and the training of AI models. Reports on the campaign published on October 22 and 23 say the strikes are disrupting key services and derailing Russian AI research, because the machines used to train and run AI models sit in exactly these buildings.

Yandex and Sber are among Russia's biggest technology players, and Sber runs the GigaChat AI chatbot. According to an Associated Press report, users logged disruptions to GigaChat on an outage tracking site in the days after the strikes, but no link to the attacks was established, and the companies have been reluctant to say what was damaged.

The campaign also changes the rules of the conflict in cyberspace and beyond. Kyiv has said it is answering Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian server sites. Some analysts have noted that the strikes may also reduce Russia's capacity to run automated online accounts used to spread propaganda, though this is hard to measure. For other countries, including India, which is building large data centres of its own, the attacks are a reminder that digital infrastructure can become a target in war and needs physical protection and backup sites, much like power stations.

Short-term: Russian users may face slower or interrupted services while companies shift work to other sites, though Yandex and Sber say core services are running.

Long-term: If AI hardware has been destroyed, Russia's ability to train and run large AI models could be delayed, since the companies would have to rebuild and re-equip the sites. The strikes may also push governments worldwide to treat data centres as critical national infrastructure, with military-grade protection and spread-out backup.

Who is affected: Russian technology companies and their users, Russia's AI programme, Ukrainian and Russian civilians in a widening war of infrastructure strikes, and operators of data centres in other countries who now have to plan for physical attack as well as cyber attack.

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