Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
A lot of the smaller drones that Ukraine is using only do limited damage - they may start a fire than can spread, but not doing to destroy an entire larger facility (although the Flamingo can do significant damage). Many Russian energy facilities just get hit repeatedly over time - Russia will fix as fast as they can. Staggering hits seems to make sense.
There are chemical based emp bombs, NNEMPs, if the penetrate through to the inside and set that off it seems like it would be pretty effective on datacenters.
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.
They just re-host it on chinese clouds. Most of european part of russia dont have mobile internet for years now and it did not change much for people living there.
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
Ukraine showed you can deploy from shipping containers delivered inside hostile lands quite successfully. As much stuff gets smuggled into US ports on a daily basis, sneaking a few of these into the US isn't impossible. Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
The genie is out of the bottle, over the next 100 years this is a real problem US, China, and Europe will face.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
This is one of the factors driving the development of orbital satellite data centers. While satellites are also vulnerable, they are at least somewhat harder to hit than a stationary terrestrial data center. For now it's questionable whether such constellations are feasible due to concerns over launch costs and cooling but some people are taking it seriously.
It's already happened to Amazon once, and they were not able to recover the data from the destroyed data centre, so they have already experienced this and have some data on which to make those decisions.
How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single MOAB? Is it an impossible number to reach for those unable to deliver MOAB?
A MOAB apparently has the equivalent of 11tons of TNT. A drone carrying a grenade has up to 180 grams. So you need about 61 111 drones to deliver the equivalent explosive. At that point it might be cheaper to just bring the MOAB.
You don't dig a hole deep enough that Bunker Busters can't penetrate. You drive up to the root of a mountain where it meets flats and drill sideways. Getting your men out in case the entrance was bombed can be tricky though.
The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/drone gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
You could do a ghaza and park human shields over military relevant infrastructure? Introducing Host.Age housing the only housing with free heating, free warn water and free leftover tokens .
Releasing drone swarms wrapping in chaff with IR lamps or laser diodes to account for different guidance methods. They cluster around predicted trajectory. Could be more cost effective than a Patriot battery
They don't all have to be drones in the conventional sense. A subset could be a set of balloons with different amounts of helium, an arduino/servos that control one or more fans for directional and limited altitude control, and a box/release with chaff inside.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
I look forward to anthropic drone swarms defending against AWS mounted infantry and OpenAI cruise drones. SpaceX is at war with Pepsi. SpaceX had always been at war with Pepsi.
I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).
Russian suicide drones are still like minimum $10k each. That's probably like ~1k rounds in 12.7mm/14.5mm or ~200 rounds in 20mm. Missiles are a lot more expensive, but the defense side cost can be substantially lower than the offense side if you could make it work with an auto turret rather than guided missiles.
Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.
The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
I seem to recall that this is optimal game theoretic strategy - don't initiate, but always immediately retaliate.
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.
That's true, however they don't use this capability like it's infinite. They only utilize this when Russia does something similar or plans of doing something similar leaks.
I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.
I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.
Will it be possible? Yes. Will it be easy, or cheap? No.
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
Problem is that RAM and disk manufacturing capacity is all sold out years ahead. Yandex while being largest IT company in Russia have nowhere near the money to compete with AI hyperscalers.
Nebius which is basically was out-of-Russia part Yandex is now larger than what left of Yandex in Russia.
I use ARM VPSes for quite some time and they are pretty performant. They don't have to replace with x86 systems. Linux on ARM is pretty mature and production ready at this point.
I don't know the hardware inside the data center, and it might not be a "AI" data center to begin with. NAND is a big problem, but DDR4 memory is not AFAICS, and if you need CPU power for serving stuff, getting it is easy.
If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!
great question, I don't have a good answer. supposedly there are gpus, here you can rent a H200 (a GPU which was released after the war had started)
https://selectel.ru/services/dedicated/hgx-h200/
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
Russians won't storm anything, but if you observe their actual behavior, it's easy to see that they don't attribute their problems to Ukraine. No one is volunteering to go fight there without very high signup bonuses and salaries.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
The problem is Russians are too afraid to turn on their motherland because "reasons" but that is exactly what has to happen to end the war. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it.
Americans are so naive about the "turn on their motherland" part. It's not really a reply to you, I just remembered some american whom I met and he was treating us as kids, saying things as "alone you are weak but together you are strong!"
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people?
You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
"The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."
There are two points to answer this question.
First is that the majority of russian population supports the war, and the number of russians that are anti-war now but can become supporters of an aggression as results of these strikes is negligible.
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
They could take accountability and face the consequences of resigning for their country responsibilities.
Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.
How come no more "Buchas" happened in the war? How come the only "Bucha" happened after Russia withdrew in anticipation of a peace agreement that was heavily opposed by UK and others?
After Nord Stream, we all know what those maniacs are capable of.
Tragically a lot Buchas happened[0], and there's plenty of videos of civilian executions - God only knows what atrocities are yet to be discovered in occupied territories.
All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.
Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s shipping containers or even privately owned houses, filled with optically controlled or autonomous drones, sitting near high value infrastructure around the world. Mirroring those Ukrainian trucks.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-helps-u...
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/drone-and-data-ce...
we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure
April 27, 2020:
"Yandex highlighted negative articles about Navalny in its search results; the company called it an "experiment."
https://zona-media.translate.goog/news/2020/04/27/navyandex?...
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
Not just for datacenters either - warehouses, refineries, power stations, you could sell to anybody with a building full of expensive stuff.
Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
This would be incredibly stupid. An attack on American soil could be met with a literally nuclear response against Iran or whoever perpetrated it.
So...the west if we go by the recent statements of chancellor Merz
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind
I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/28/russia-lets-privat...
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).
https://missilethreat.csis.org/countermeasures-penetration-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
Obelisks from Command and Conquer pinned to the roof of the DC would be amusing although personally I'm leaning towards prism towers.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.
I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.
I haven't seen any site I frequent mention this once. The PR bubble is very real.
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
Nebius which is basically was out-of-Russia part Yandex is now larger than what left of Yandex in Russia.
If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
Here's a better source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
(looks like they changed "center" to "centre")
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
It seems to have somehow escaped your notice that Russia has been storming Ukraine for almost 5 years.
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people? You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
"The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."
As opposed to right now where they are the best of friends?
In which ways does the situation where "most Russians turn on Ukraine" differ from the current reality?
https://wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/spe...
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.
After Nord Stream, we all know what those maniacs are capable of.
All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...
https://united24media.com/world/yandex-hides-all-four-cloud-...
>Scottish independence accounts go dark after Iran internet blackout
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/12/scottish-ind...
It's probably one of the safest places on the planet.