Reuters reports Sberbank owns the center; a senior company executive said the hit did not disrupt operations.
Reuters reports that Ukrainian drones hit Russia's biggest data center, owned by Sberbank, the country's largest bank and technology company. A senior company executive said the hit did not disrupt operations.
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A Ukrainian drone strike hit Sberbank's data center in Balakovo, in Russia's Saratov region, on Wednesday, October 14. The attack was the fourth reported strike on a major Russian data center in a week, after three facilities operated by Yandex were hit.
Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin confirmed the attack to Reuters but said the bank's systems and services were operating normally and without disruption. Neither Sberbank nor Yandex has said whether any supercomputers were damaged.
Russia's state news agency RIA reported in 2024 that the Balakovo center was being built to host the country's largest supercomputer, scheduled to begin operating in 2027. The 55,000-square-meter site sits near the Balakovo nuclear power plant and the Saratov hydroelectric plant; Reuters said no damage was reported at either energy facility.
Sberbank and Yandex are Russia's two leading domestic AI developers, behind the GigaChat and YandexGPT models. According to Sberbank's own estimate, Russian models trail leading US and Chinese systems by as much as nine months, partly because Western sanctions make advanced computing hardware harder to obtain. An IT expert told Reuters that replacing damaged chips could be slow and expensive because they must be imported through indirect routes.
The Sberbank strike followed attacks that severely damaged three of Yandex's six data centers, according to the Financial Times. Those earlier strikes disrupted services including email, taxis, payment accounts and websites that relied on Yandex infrastructure, exposing how much of Russia's online economy depends on a small number of facilities.
Ukraine says its attacks are a response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure. Russian officials have discussed stronger defenses and moving some hardware underground. President Vladimir Putin also convened an information-security meeting that included Sberbank CEO German Gref, though the Kremlin denied the meeting was prompted by the recent strikes.
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