Ukrainian Drone Strikes Push Russian Data Centers Underground

Ukrainian drone strikes have degraded or destroyed data centers operated by Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte and the Russian Ministry of Finance, disrupting cloud services for millions of Russian users and triggering hasty plans to move computing facilities underground.

The damage extends beyond single facilities. The strikes hit sites housing AI supercomputers, according to the reporting on the campaign. The outages disrupted cloud services for millions of Russian users. Russia has bombarded Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles nearly night and day in recent months, and since late September it has specifically targeted Ukrainian data centers in parallel strikes, exploiting gaps in Ukrainian air defense.

The commercial consequences now reach the highest levels of the Russian state. The Kremlin is requiring data center owners to reserve computing capacity for emergency state needs, a mandate that reduces the capacity available to commercial customers. The government has also authorized the possible use of foreign data centers, an extraordinary step for a country whose localization laws long required Russian user data to remain on Russian soil.

Who is building what, and where?

State-owned telecommunications company Rostelecom has raised the possibility of moving some Russian data centers underground in talks with Norilsk Nickel, the nickel and palladium mining company, according to the Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The logic is straightforward: Norilsk operates mine infrastructure that offers physical protection no surface building can match.

The industry publication Data Center Dynamics also pointed to a recent proposal by a Russian regional governor to build data centers within open-pit coal mines. The same proposal calls for planting green public parks above the facilities as camouflage. Neither plan has a confirmed timeline, budget or capacity figure.

The proposals mark a shift in how Russia treats data center siting. Before the war, operators prioritized proximity to power grids, fiber routes and customers. Physical hardening against aerial attack was not a design criterion. Ukrainian retaliation has changed that calculation for facilities operated by:

• Yandex, Russia's largest technology company
• Sberbank, the state-owned bank
• VKontakte, the dominant Russian social media platform
• The Russian Ministry of Finance

What does the strike campaign change?

Both sides now treat data centers as legitimate infrastructure targets. Russia struck Ukrainian data centers beginning in late September, and Ukraine answered with strikes on military and infrastructure targets across Russia. The exchange has produced a symmetry of disruption that neither side's technology sector anticipated at the war's start.

For Russian operators, the exposure is structural. Surface data centers concentrate compute in fixed, identifiable locations. AI supercomputers concentrate it further, because training and inference clusters demand dense power delivery and cooling that few sites can supply. One successful strike on such a site removes capacity that cannot be quickly replaced under Western export controls on advanced chips.

The underground proposals attempt to solve the vulnerability with geology rather than air defense. Mine shafts and open pits absorb blast effects that defeat conventional building shells. The tradeoffs are familiar to anyone who has operated industrial equipment below ground: humidity, ventilation, limited expansion space and difficult fiber routing.

The Kremlin's reserved-capacity mandate adds a second constraint. Operators must now plan for state requisition of compute during emergencies, which compresses the effective commercial capacity of any facility they build or relocate.

No Russian company has yet announced a signed agreement, a construction start date or a capacity commitment for an underground facility. Until one does, the plans remain proposals, and Russian cloud infrastructure remains exposed to a drone campaign that has already demonstrated it can reach the country's most important computing assets.