Ukrainian drones hit Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, Russia, on a recent day this month. The strike caused a large fire and forced the company to shut down the site, according to Reuters and Meduza. The outage knocked Yandex Cloud services offline for many users.
What was inside the hit facility?
The Sasovo center is one of Yandex’s five major data hubs. It holds tens of thousands of servers and two Nvidia A100‑based supercomputers called Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Both machines are used to train Yandex’s AI models, including YandexGPT, Russia’s leading large language model.
How powerful were the machines?
Chervonenkis was once listed as the world’s 19th most powerful supercomputer in the Top 500 ranking in 2021. Its peak performance of 21.53 FP64 petaflops (PFLOPS) would place it around 101st today. Western sanctions have prevented Yandex from upgrading the system.
Why it matters
The shutdown means Yandex Cloud services are currently unavailable for businesses and developers relying on them. It also highlights how geopolitical conflict can interrupt AI research infrastructure, leaving the future of the two supercomputers uncertain.
