Ukrainian drones
hit Russia’s largest data center
on Wednesday. This was Ukraine’s fourth strike on
Russian data centers
in the past week and confirmation of a new reality of war: data centers are valuable enemy assets and they will be targeted.
In 2006, British economist Clive Humby
declared
“data is the new oil,” and big tech adopted the metaphor. Twenty years later, a dark side of the truism has been revealed. If the places where oil is refined are valuable targets in a war then so, too, are the places where data is refined. We’ve seen this not just in the Russia-Ukraine war, but also with Iran hitting Amazon Web Services data centers in Dubai in retaliation for America’s strikes on the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed strikes on Russian data centers and oil refineries
in a post on X
and called them a “symmetrical response" to Russian aggression. Here we have oil and data together again, not as a metaphor in an economics lecture, but in the pronouncement of a world leader defending his country. conducting a war.
Three of Ukraine’s strikes hit data centers that belonged to Yandex,
Russia’s Google-equivalent
, and damaged the company’s supercomputers that housed some of its AI models. The latest attack hit a data center operated by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank. It’s too early to tell what the effects of the strike on the Sberbank data center will be, but the three strikes on Yandex have disrupted internet and communications across Russia.
An online rumor said that the strikes on Yandex had the effect of taking down Russian bot farms,
but this wasn’t true
. The effects of the strikes on the civilian population were much more severe. Yandex is ubiquitous in Russia — it has its own app store, payment services, dating services, taxi and bus apps, and email services. The company operates six data centers in Russia and the strikes knocked two of them offline completely. People in Russia have lost access to their email, some o
