Ukraine hit Russia's largest data center

Ukraine launched an attack with unmanned aerial vehicles on Sberbank's data center in Balakovo, Russia's Saratov region.

The senior management of Sberbank, Russia's largest bank and one of the leading technology companies, confirmed the attack in a statement.

According to Reuters, Sberbank First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors, Aleksandr Vedyakhin, said in a statement to journalists: "We confirm that our data center was attacked. However, all systems and services of Sberbank are working normally without any interruption."

The attack on Sberbank took place at a time when the data centers of the Russian technology company Yandex were also targeted.

In the last week, three data centers belonging to Yandex were targeted in Ukraine's UAV attacks.

Yandex announced that its data centers in Sasovo in the Ryazan region on October 8 and in the city of Vladimir on October 11 were damaged and their activities were completely stopped.

The company also reported that its data center in the Kaluga region was damaged in the attack on October 9.

While there were outages in some of Yandex's digital services following the attacks, Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitriy Peskov stated in his statement on October 13 that the problem was handled by the government and efforts were being made to repair the damage.

Ukraine, on the other hand, argues that it is responding to Russia's attacks on its data infrastructure.

Sberbank and Yandex are among the two most important companies in Russia in the field of artificial intelligence technologies.

Sberbank's GigaChat and Yandex's YandexGPT models stand out in the country's domestic artificial intelligence market.

While both companies have made significant investments in the development of artificial intelligence technologies, sanctions imposed by Western countries on Russia make access to advanced hardware difficult.

It is stated that this situation causes Russian companies to fall behind their global competitors in the USA and China in the field of artificial intelligence.

The data center in Balakovo, which was the target of the attack, covers an area of ​​approximately 55 thousand square meters.

According to the news published by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti in 2024, the facility is expected to host Russia's largest supercomputer, which is planned to become operational in 2027.

The data center is located near the Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant and the Saratov Hydroelectric Power Plant.