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Ukrainian drones struck a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, causing a massive fire that forced the company to shut down the facility, according to Reuters and Meduza. The site reportedly houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development, though it remains unclear whether the systems sustained any damage. Russian missiles had previously struck Ukrainian digital infrastructure earlier this month.

The Sasovo facility accommodates tens of thousands of servers, including two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis was once ranked as the world’s 19th most powerful supercomputer in 2021 but is now only strong enough for the 101st place by today’s standards. Due to Western sanctions, Yandex cannot upgrade the system. Both machines have been used to train AI models, including YandexGPT, Russia’s leading large language model.

The company has not yet disclosed if its supercomputers were affected, but experts note that judging by the fire, their chances of survival are low. If destroyed, many elements may be lost forever, and Yandex will likely need to use Chinese infrastructure for future training. The attack also disrupted services like Yandex Mail, Disk, Pay, and Russian Railways, while corporate systems for T-Bank and Ozon experienced issues.