Russian tech companies are moving to harden and hide their data centers underground after Ukrainian drone strikes damaged facilities housing AI supercomputers and disrupted cloud services for millions of Russian users, according to Ars Technica.
The report says Ukrainian strikes degraded or knocked out data centers operated by Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte and the Russian Ministry of Finance. Yandex has relocated all three of its main supercomputers after strikes targeted the AI data centers where they were housed, according to Meduza.
Rostelcom has raised the possibility of moving some Russian data centers underground in talks with the nickel and palladium mining company Norilsk, according to Vedomosti. Data Center Dynamics also pointed to a proposal by a Russian regional governor to build data centers within open-pit coal mines.
According to Meduza, Putin signed a decree on November 2 requiring Russian data center operators to set aside 10 percent of available space and capacity in case the government needs it. The decree also allows a special government commission to authorize use of foreign data centers, in consultation with Russia's Federal Security Service. The report notes this is a policy change, since the Sovereign Internet Law has blocked Russian companies from using cloud infrastructure outside Russia.
Ars Technica reports that the outages affected payment and banking apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming, and ride-hailing and food delivery services.