Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers disrupt key services and derail AI research

Russia prides itself on its digital advances – from an extensive e-commerce services sector to ambitious intends for developing artificial intelligence.

What happened

But now, some of the key data centers at the heart of its technical prowess have been knocked out by Ukrainian drone attacks in the 4 1/2-year-old full-scale invasion, suffering damage that could take a long time to repair.

Ukraine this month hit three main data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, one for Russia's biggest bank, Sberbank, and one for social media platform VKontakte, the country's equivalent to Facebook.

While Yandex, Sberbank and VKontakte are coy regarding the damage, residents and businesses throughout Russia have noted widespread interruptions to cloud services. As well as Alisa, Yandex's virtual assistant, and multimodal AI chatbots all have suffered lasting disruptions, banking, e-commerce, geolocation and ride-hailing services.

The bottom line

For now, ukraines strikes on Russian data centers disrupt key services and derail AI remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.