Drones hit Yandex’s Sasovo data center, home to two of its AI supercomputers
First major attack on a Russian data hub of the war
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 8, 2026 drones struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region, starting a fire.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 8 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra161 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5100 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash191 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7130 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 100 days before it.
Key facts
- Location: Sasovo, Ryazan region; fire confirmed (NASA fire monitoring, per The Moscow Times); no casualties reported
- Yandex said operations at the center were fully suspended and some services might be unavailable; core consumer services were not affected (Reuters via US News/NBC)
- Downdetector: 1,300+ reports of problems with Yandex Cloud, Documents and Tables; Meduza also lists Yandex Disk and sites such as Cian and Russian Railways
- Supercomputers at Sasovo: Lyapunov and Chervonenkis (Chervonenkis was No. 19 on the TOP500 in 2021); the third, Galushkin, is in Vladimir (Meduza)
- Yandex shares fell 3.4% in morning trading (The Moscow Times)
- Ukraine had not officially commented (Meduza). Since late September, Russian strikes damaged or destroyed data centers of at least eight companies in Ukraine; Russia’s Defense Ministry said they processed intelligence data for Ukraine’s armed forces
What happened
The strike was part of an overnight wave in which Russia said it intercepted 399 Ukrainian drones over 18 regions; refineries in Bashkortostan and Omsk were also hit. Meduza notes it is unclear whether the data center or a nearby plant was the intended target.
Why it matters
AI compute has become a military target on both sides of the war. Losing Sasovo takes most of Yandex’s training supercomputing offline, which affects Russia’s main domestic model developer.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 4 press
Press
- Reuters: Drones hit Yandex data centre in first major attack on Russian data hubreuters.com, press
- US News (Reuters): Drones hit Yandex data centre in first major attack on Russian data hubusnews.com, press
- Meduza: Ukraine strikes Yandex data center housing two of the company’s supercomputersmeduza.io, press
- The Moscow Times: Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data center after wave of Russian attacksthemoscowtimes.com, press
Changes
- Filed