Data Centers Become Targets in Modern Warfare

Strikes Hit Yandex and Sberbank Infrastructure

Ukrainian drones struck Russia's largest data center, operated by Sberbank, on Wednesday. It was Ukraine's fourth strike on Russian data centers in the past week and pointed to a new reality of war: data centers are now valuable enemy assets.

Three earlier strikes targeted data centers belonging to Yandex, Russia's answer to Google. The attacks damaged supercomputers that housed some of the company's AI models. Yandex operates six data centers in Russia, and two were knocked offline completely.

In 2006, British economist Clive Humby declared "data is the new oil." Two decades later, the metaphor has a dark side: if the places where oil is refined are valuable targets in war, so too are the places where data is processed.

The strikes are not isolated. Russia has targeted Ukrainian data centers for months, and Iran hit Amazon Web Services data centers in Dubai earlier this year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the strikes on X, calling them a "symmetrical response" to Russian aggression.

Civilian Life Disrupted

The effects on everyday Russians have been severe. Yandex is ubiquitous in the country, with its own app store, payment services, dating services, taxi and bus apps and email services. People have lost access to email, some data appears to be gone, and taxi and bus apps work only intermittently.

ChrisO_wiki, an anonymous researcher who translates Russian social media posts for the western web, chronicled the fallout. A taxi driver from Yekaterinburg said he can no longer view his order history and that trip statuses update with a delay. The loss of Yandex's cloud services has also hit commercial logistics, with workers unable to register incoming goods under electronic document management systems.

Legal Questions Loom

Klaudia Klonowska, a researcher studying how emerging technologies affect international law, said attacks on data centers are so new that the legal framework is still developing. Facilities processing purely military data could be lawful targets, but most are dual use, housing both civilian and military data, making them hard to assess.

When Russia struck Ukrainian data centers in September, state backed news agencies claimed they hosted data for Palantir supporting Ukrainian intelligence, which Ukraine denied. Klonowska said civilians suffer most when data centers go offline, raising questions of proportionality since prolonged internet outages affect hospitals, traffic and judicial services.

She argued that separating civilian and military data would clarify which buildings are legitimate targets. France recently unveiled an underground data center on the outskirts of Paris exclusively for military use.

Communities Push Back on New Builds

The risk is not lost on American communities. Los Alamos National Laboratories has partnered with the University of Michigan to attempt to build a data center in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, whose city attorney said the facility would be a "high value target" in future wars.

Los Alamos pushed back in a letter to the community in September, saying the attorney created that terminology without basis and it should not be read as evidence of a known, specific or imminent threat. It said the center would use controlled access, cameras and on site security personnel, with coordination among local, state and federal partners.

Ukrainian drones slipping past Russian air defenses to hit Yandex data centers shows the township's fears are not theoretical.

Sources: 404 Media