Major Russian data centre owned by leading AI company attacked by drones

Ukrainian drones are believed to have damaged the facility (Picture: east2west)

Russia’s leading AI and technology company had its major data centre hit by suspected Ukrainian drones this week.

The company announced today that the attack caused a fire and forced the company to fully suspend the centre’s operations.

Yandex,which runs YandexGPT – one of Russia’s leading generative AI models – said it was dealing with the consequences and restoring affected services.

The company said that its core consumer services were not affected.

The attack on the data centre followed a wave of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres in recent weeks.

Previously,there were no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centres.

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Start your day informed with Metro's News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.On the website of its Yandex Cloud service,the company said there were problems with the electricity supply at one data centre ‘zone’,and recommended customers use other zones.The massive facility burned for hours (Picture: east2west)Yandex has been described as ‘Russia’s Google’. It is the country’s biggest internet technology company,operating its main search engine plus major cloud,mapping,taxi,delivery and other digital services.On the same site,a major military-linked metals company,Sasta,was hit.This supplies parts to Russian tactical missiles and has been sanctioned by Britain and other Western states. Separately,Ukrainian forces attacked a major refinery belonging to Gazprom,located in Salavat,870 miles from the Ukrainian border,and one of the largest oil refining and petrochemical complexes in Russia.Ukrainian forces also attacked the Samara-2 pumping station,one of the largest oil tank farms in Europe,and crucial to Putin’s dollar-earning capacity to fund his war.After Wednesday’s Russian strikes,Ukrainians were warned they could face up to 11 hours of power outages today.A new Russian drone attack on Kyiv today led to another four deaths and 21 injuries.Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at .For more stories like this,check our news page.