Last week, Ukrainian drones took out three data centers owned by Yandex, the internet conglomerate sometimes referred to as Russia’s Google, in retaliation for Russian strikes on its own data centers. Because Yandex is thoroughly integrated into Russian life as a provider of cloud services, the strikes caused severe disruptions across the country, impeding Russians’ ability to send emails, make payments, and navigate the streets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy even suggested that they led to a decline in bot activity on social media platforms (a claim that was soon disputed).
These strikes will have minimal effect on the global race to develop and adopt artificial intelligence. Russia is nowhere close to the cutting edge of the field—lagging as much as three to five years behind the United States and China, according to a Kremlin-aligned university. It is hamstrung by lack of access to cutting-edge chips and by a brain drain of engineers, both issues that emerged following its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
Even so, Ukraine’s drone strikes will likely still set back Russian AI efforts further, because Yandex’s three supercomputers (located in the data centers that were struck) run on Nvidia A100s—U.S.-designed chips that Russia will be unable to easily replace. And the strikes have continued: earlier this week, Ukraine hit another data center that was under construction, this one belonging to Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.
by Council on Foreign Relations – Ukraine’s Attacks on Russian Data Centers Lay Bare a Global Risk to AI
