Strike on Yandex Data Center: Five of Nine Buildings Damaged
Satellite images revealed that the strike on the Yandex data center in the Vladimir region damaged five of the nine buildings located on the site.
The images were published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
The attack took place on the night of October 11. A fire broke out on the facility’s grounds as a result of the drone strikes.
Judging by the satellite images, both of the company’s data centers located at this site were damaged. In the first data center, all four buildings were hit and sustained numerous impacts, while in the second data center, satellite images recorded a single impact.
This and other Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers caused serious disruptions to the Russian segment of the internet and popular services, including the Yandex Pay payment system.
Yandex data center in the Vladimir region
The Yandex data center in Vladimir is one of the largest in the company’s network. Its rated capacity is approximately 56 MW.
The first phase of the data center began operations in September 2017. The capacity of the first phase was 10 MW; the initial project called for a gradual expansion of IT capacity to 40 MW and the installation of 2,880 server racks.
This data center houses one of the company’s three supercomputers—the Galushkin, which was commissioned in June 2021. It consisted of 136 computing nodes equipped with AMD EPYC 7702 processors and 1,088 NVIDIA A100 graphics accelerators with 80 GB of memory. The system had 136 TB of RAM, and its nodes were connected via a high-speed InfiniBand HDR network.
Its theoretical peak performance reached 20.64 petaflops. In November 2021, the system ranked 36th on the global TOP500 list and second among Russian supercomputers.
According to the Russian opposition publication T-invariant, it, like Yandex’s other two supercomputers, was likely damaged as a result of Ukrainian attacks. All of Yandex’s supercomputers were used primarily for training neural networks.
“It will not be possible to restore the operation of supercomputers of this caliber. And the issue isn’t even about having the money. The main problem isn’t even the sanctions, but the shortage of chips and other components: there’s a huge waiting list for them worldwide. However, the costs of gray and black market imports are also very high,” says a supercomputer expert interviewed by the publication.
In March 2026, Yandex launched a new data center with a stated capacity of 40 MW and space for 2,800 server racks, as well as independent power and communications systems.
