Drone strikes on data centres operated by Sber and Yandex have added to Russia’s existing constraints on building AI infrastructure, The Moscow Times reports. The October strikes hit facilities accounting for about 11% of the country’s data-centre capacity, according to the report.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
The Moscow Times says most services have been restored, but cites Kommersant as reporting that full repairs could take up to six months. Yandex said it had restored access to about 97% of the cloud customer data affected; the remaining 3% was permanently lost, the paper reports. A teacher interviewed by The Moscow Times said a platform running on Yandex services was still experiencing disruptions this month.
The damage lands on top of constraints the report describes: shortages of advanced chips, limited electricity-grid capacity and high construction costs. Russia has an estimated 1.8 gigawatts of data-centre capacity, while the Moscow region is expected to add 66 megawatts in 2026, down from 199 megawatts originally planned.
Why it matters
AI needs more than ambitious plans and clever models. It needs reliable power, servers and data centres that can be built and kept running. In Russia, the reported damage adds a physical risk to an expansion already hampered by equipment shortages, sanctions and strained power grids.
The figures also show why restoration is not the same as erasing the consequences: Yandex says some affected customer data is permanently lost, while the reported repair timeline for the facilities stretches for months. That is a concrete infrastructure setback, not a verdict on the quality of any particular Russian AI model.
Our read
The useful story here is the collision between national AI ambitions and the unglamorous infrastructure required to make them work. Data centres can be damaged, power can run short and advanced chips are not easily replaced. AI strategy, meet the building.
The Moscow Times provides the reporting on the strikes and their wider context, while attributing the restoration figures to Yandex and the repair estimate to Kommersant. Those distinctions matter: one set of figures describes data access, another the facilities themselves.
What to watch
- Whether the affected facilities are fully repaired on the reported timetable.
- How much planned Russian data-centre capacity is delayed or cancelled.
- Whether electricity and advanced-chip shortages continue to constrain AI infrastructure growth.
Discussion spark: Should governments treat data centres that underpin AI as critical infrastructure deserving extra protection, or would that create more risks than it solves?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (11 November 2026, 17:34 UTC)
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