While the artificial intelligence race today progresses between the US and China, Russia, once a primary rival to the US, is rarely mentioned. Yet, Russia has always prioritized building its own digital ecosystem. In many areas, from navigation to cloud services, Russia relies on its domestic solutions. However, it's currently not possible to speak of such a breakthrough for artificial intelligence. One of the significant reasons for this is the ongoing war in Ukraine for years. In particular, Ukraine's targeting of data centers in Russia is dealing a major blow to Russia's efforts to rival the US and China in AI.
In attacks this month alone, three Yandex data centers, a data center belonging to Sberbank (one of Russia's largest banks), and a facility used by the social media platform VKontakte were hit. The attacks caused disruptions in many services across Russia, from cloud services to online shopping. Moreover, according to experts, the impact of the attacks is not limited to daily digital services. The damage caused by these attacks to data centers is also making it exceedingly difficult for Russia to achieve its goals in the field of artificial intelligence.
Following Ukraine's attacks in October, problems were also reported with Yandex's virtual assistant Alisa and its multimodal AI chatbots. Yandex announced that it brought most of its core cloud services back online in the following days by activating other data centers. However, this does not mean that the damaged hardware and the company's long-term computing capacity have been fully restored. Satellite images indicate severe damage to the facilities. Furthermore, it is believed that fires after the attacks may have caused heavy damage to high-performance chips and other sensitive electronic equipment.
Repairing Data Centers Could Take Years
Data centers are complex structures composed of numerous sensitive components. In addition to servers, high-performance processors, network equipment, power distribution systems, and cooling infrastructure are also critical for the uninterrupted operation of these centers. Systems used to train AI models, in particular, require high-cost hardware and intensive energy consumption. Therefore, simply replacing damaged servers after attacks is not enough. This is why repairing such damage can take months, or even years.
At this point, Russia's digital sovereignty policy also becomes a hindrance for the country. Ukraine can turn to a data center in another European country to replace a hit data center. Russia, however, relies entirely on its own infrastructure because it does not trust other European countries. Consequently, unlike Ukraine, Russia does not have an alternative from which it can procure services from abroad.
Therefore, to fully resume its work in the field of artificial intelligence, Russia needs to repair and expand its own data centers. At this juncture, US sanctions and the global bottleneck in chip supply are making Russia's job difficult. All these factors combined turn the repair or renewal of damaged data centers into a much more challenging process.
On the other hand, renewing this hardware without ensuring the security of these facilities is seen as a problem in itself. For this reason, as long as Ukrainian drones threaten data centers, it seems unlikely that Russia will be able to use its data centers optimally. This means that Russia's artificial intelligence goals will be quite difficult to achieve.
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