Why Data Centers Have Become Military Targets
Ukraine’s response began on Oct. 8, and it has since carried out drone strikes on three data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, often called Russia’s version of Google. The first site hit, in Sasovo, houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models, Meduza reported, and the outage disrupted several companies relying on Yandex’s cloud services, including Russian Railways, MegaFon, T-Bank, and several media outlets.
Following the first strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky defended the retaliation: “We always respond in kind. You all know that they are hitting and hitting our data centers; we responded to them.”
How have tech companies responded?
The spate of attacks over the last year has already caused tech companies to rethink how and where they build data centers.
The United Arab Emirates is reportedly revising plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data center project following the Iranian strikes. The original plan envisioned a 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi, to be built in partnership with American tech companies like Oracle, Nvidia, and Cisco. Now the data centers will likely be spread out across the UAE, according to officials who spoke to Reuters.
