Russian tech companies are moving to harden and hide their data centers underground after Ukrainian drone strikes damaged facilities that housed AI supercomputers and disrupted cloud services for millions of Russian users, according to Ars Technica.
The report says Ukrainian strikes degraded or knocked out data centers operated by Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte and the Russian Ministry of Finance. It also says Yandex has relocated all three of its main supercomputers after strikes targeted the AI data centers where they were housed, citing Meduza.
Rostelcom has raised the possibility of moving some data centers underground in talks with the mining company Norilsk, according to the Russian newspaper Vedomosti. Data Center Dynamics pointed to a proposal by a Russian regional governor to build data centers within open-pit coal mines, with parks planted above for camouflage.
On November 2, Putin signed a decree requiring data center operators to set aside 10 percent of available space and capacity for possible government use, according to Meduza. The decree also lets a special government commission authorize use of foreign data centers in consultation with the Federal Security Service. The report notes this is a notable change from the Sovereign Internet Law, which had blocked Russian companies from using cloud infrastructure outside Russia.
The report says Russia's centralized system, dominated by a few tech companies, has left popular payment, banking, e-commerce, streaming and delivery apps exposed to disruption. Ukraine's more decentralized digital services have proven more resilient, the report says, in part because Amazon and Microsoft helped move government resources to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe after February 2022. Ukraine has also used SpaceX's Starlink terminals as a backup communications system, the report says, with the terminals paid for by the United States and European countries including Poland and Germany.