Ukrainian drones hit a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, causing a massive fire and forcing the company to shut down the facility, according to Reuters and Meduza. Many services using Yandex Cloud are down following the attack. The site reportedly houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development, though it remains unclear whether the systems sustained any damage, as for now their fate is unclear. Russian missiles struck Ukrainian digital infrastructure earlier this month.
The Sasovo facility, one of Yandex's five major data centers, accommodates tens of thousands of servers, including two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis, the company's most powerful system, was once ranked as the world's 19th most powerful supercomputer in the Top 500 list in 2021, but by today's standards its 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS is enough only for the 101st place in the list. Due to Western sanctions, Yandex can no longer upgrade the system. Both machines have been used to train AI models, including YandexGPT, Russia's leading large language model. Yandex's third supercomputer, Galushkin, is located in Vladimir.
So far, the company has not disclosed whether its supercomputers were affected by the strike, though judging by the massive fire caused by the drone incident, the systems' chances of survival are low. The potential damage to Nvidia-powered computing infrastructure could be extremely painful for Russia's AI industry, which is already constrained by restrictions on exports of advanced AI accelerators and servers to Russia. If the machines are indeed destroyed or damaged, many of its elements may be lost forever, and Yandex will be forced to use Chinese infrastructure for future model training.
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