Ukrainian strikes disable three Yandex data centers in Russia

Ukrainian drone strikes have disabled three data centers in Russia that were actively training Yandex GPT. The affected facilities, located in Cherviskin ski, Lyapunov, and dilution, possessed a combined capacity of 69 petaflops, with individual capacities of 29, 20, and 20 petaflops respectively. These supercomputers rely on NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The disruption immediately halted model training and impacted payments, maps, and cloud services across the country. Yandex, which holds approximately 70% of the Russian search market, was in the middle of training its latest AI models when the strikes occurred. The event underscores the physical fragility of AI infrastructure, as the destruction of hardware immediately halts service availability. Some observers argue that this incident demonstrates that AI safety fears are overhyped, noting that physical infrastructure can be easily disabled, which proves that humans retain control over AI systems through their reliance on electricity and resources. As one commentator noted, all it takes is for a data center to be down and the whole service can't run anymore.