Ukraine’s drone strikes spur hasty Russian plans for underground data centers

Russian tech companies are scrambling 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. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is requiring data center owners to reserve computing capacity for emergency state needs and has even authorized possible use of foreign data centers.

These consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine come as the Russian military has bombarded Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles nearly night and day in recent months, along with specifically targeting Ukrainian data centers since late September. But Ukraine has retaliated with its own drone strikes on military and infrastructure targets across Russia, degrading or knocking out data centers operated by Russian tech giant Yandex, the state-owned bank Sberbank, social media site VKontakte, and the Russian Ministry of Finance.

Now, state-owned telecommunications company Rostelcom has raised the possibility of moving some Russian data centers underground in talks with the nickel and palladium mining company Norilsk, according to Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The industry publication Data Center Dynamics also pointed to a recent proposal by a Russian regional governor to build data centers within open-pit coal mines while planting green public parks above as camouflage.

On November 2, Putin also signed a decree ordering Russian data center operators to set aside 10 percent of available space and capacity in case the Russian government requires it, according to independent Russian news publication Meduza. That may indicate growing Kremlin concerns about the vulnerability of Russian cloud computing infrastructure during its war with Ukraine.

Putin’s decree also allows a special Russian government commission to authorize use of foreign data centers in consultation with Russia’s Federal Security Service. That marks a notable policy change because Putin and the Russian parliament previously enacted Russia’s “Sovereign Internet Law,” which has blocked Russian companies from using cloud computing infrastructure outside Russia’s borders.

Russia’s push for a sovereign and increasingly closed Internet has resulted in a highly centralized system under a few Russian tech companies like Yandex. That hyper-centralized system has now proven vulnerable during wartime, as Ukrainian drone strikes on key Russian data centers created widespread disruptions for popular payment and digital banking apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, and ride-hailing and food delivery apps, among others.

Yandex has also been forced to relocate all three of its main supercomputers after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted the AI data centers where they were originally housed, Meduza reported.

By comparison, Ukraine’s decentralized digital services have proven much more resilient despite years of Russian drone and missile attacks, especially as the government has taken more steps to disperse crucial energy and telecommunications nodes and bury more supporting infrastructure underground.

A big boost came from US tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, which helped Ukraine migrate government resources and other crucial digital services to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Ukrainian government has also used SpaceX’s Starlink satellite terminals—paid for by the United States and European countries such as Poland and Germany—as a backup communications system.

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