Over four days last week, Ukrainian drones struck three data centers operated by Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company. Facilities went offline, disrupting services used by banks, retailers, and ordinary Russians. One of the sites, in Sasovo, housed tens of thousands of servers and two of the supercomputers used to develop Yandex’s AI models.

The strikes followed Russian attacks on Ukraine’s own digital infrastructure, including one that left Kyiv’s Parkovyi Data Center so badly damaged that its operators said the facility could not be restored.

The back-and-forth offers a glimpse of the damage that can be inflicted by attacking the physical infrastructure of the digital economy. And with governments and tech companies pouring billions into the data centers powering AI, including its growing military applications, the stakes are only getting higher.

When I reported from Ukraine this summer, I saw how the country’s military was putting AI to work, from helping drones navigate without GPS to analyzing battlefield intelligence and recommending decisions to commanders. Many of those applications depend on powerful computing infrastructure—and that infrastructure, often housed in enormous buildings full of expensive computers, isn’t particularly hard to find. As the latest strikes show, it isn’t necessarily hard to hit, either.

“If the Russians or the Chinese were using AI to accelerate their operations, I would definitely want to target those data centers,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a distinguished fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Lewis is particularly concerned about facilities handling AI inference, the process of running trained models .

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