On Monday, Yandex announced that its three major supercomputers—Chervonenkis, Galushkin, and Lyapunov—suffered no damage after a series of Ukrainian drone attacks targeted the company's data centers earlier this month. These supercomputers, launched between 2020 and 2021, are some of the most powerful globally but have seen their leading positions decline amid the rapidly advancing global AI race. Following the attacks, Yandex moved the supercomputers to more secure facilities and stated that once reactivated, they will reintegrate into the company's service infrastructure and continue to be used for training foundational language models.
The drone strikes caused temporary service disruptions across multiple Yandex platforms in Russia, including ride-hailing, food delivery, and banking services, and affected corporate clients using Yandex Cloud. The Kremlin noted it was too early to estimate financial losses but confirmed that Yandex was actively managing the incident's aftermath. Russia’s Digital Development Ministry supported Yandex by migrating key systems to external backup servers and approved a set of protective measures against future drone attacks, as reported by Kommersant. These measures recommend building critical data facilities underground, fortifying structures to withstand blasts, deploying electronic warfare tools, maintaining data backups, and coordinating with military and National Guard forces.
President Vladimir Putin pledged retaliation following the attacks and had previously instructed officials to strengthen the country's digital infrastructure defenses. Ukraine stated that its strikes respond to similar Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers. This marks Yandex’s first public statement about its supercomputers since the drone incidents began.
The article was originally published by The Moscow Times on October 26, 2026.