Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/dronr gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required.
It will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralises. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.
Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
There are two points to answer this question.
First is that the majority of russian population supports the war, and the number of russians that are anti-war now but can become supporters of an aggression as results of these strikes is negligible.
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
How effective are the western embargos? Will it be possible for them to replace destroyed hardware?
Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations: > Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities. > The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations. > American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses. > US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-helps-u...
New Startup idea - private anti-air batteries for data centers
We have this already in Ukraine: https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/thirty-companies-have-already-joi...
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/dronr gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
Unironically could be a legit business model.
Not just for datacenters either - warehouses, refineries, power stations, you could sell to anybody with a building full of expensive stuff.
In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
Obviously your biggest customers would be in active warzones, or areas worried about soon becoming warzones.
Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
believe it or not but legislation can change pretty quickly when shit actually hits the fan
I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
Oil tankers..
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
It is, or at least it's expected that Russian companies get their own air defense:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/28/russia-lets-privat...
There surely is a point where it's cheaper and safer to bury them underground.
I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.
Look up the capabilities of GBU-28 and other Bunker Busters first.
These are a lot more expensive and difficult to deploy. They weigh several tons. You can't just strap one to a $200 quadcopter and fly it over.
The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
to use a GBU-28 or similar you need to establish air superiority first
"Silo"
Russia recently ordered corporations to start funding their own air defense.
Sounds like Snow Crash becoming slowly a reality.
Russian companies have had mercenaries of different kinds for some time now. Im sure Redut has anti air batteries.
Much of this was taken back into government control after Wagner shot down government helicopters and a plane.
No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
The irony of your username is not lost on me.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
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You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required.
https://missilethreat.csis.org/countermeasures-penetration-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
More DCs are than obviously required for the battery packs these laser turrets shoot.
Looking like we be getting Obelisks from Command and Conquer soon. Personally I preferred prism towers.
It will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
Seems like a mistake to stagger these hits, doing both in the same hour could have taken out backups before they had a chance to replicate elsewhere.
There's little difference between 1 hour and 48 hours when it comes to the amount of data in question here.
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralises. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
Taking out GPUs is more important than storage nowdays.
Replacing the RAM is going to be expensive
They should consider withdrawing from Ukraine
Nebius Slack channels going wild now
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.
I heard from friends that a lot Ukraine's large distribution centers were also hit lately after Ukraine hit Russia's.
I haven't seen any site I frequent mention this once. The PR bubble is very real.
You frequent bad sites then. Don't make a conspiracy based on your own bad media consumption.
Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
What are you referring to?
Imagine when something hits us-east-1 as part of the opening shot of a major future conflict..
If a foreign nation gets the capabilty to directly strike US soil we are way past worrying about us-east-1
someone go correlate whether this leads to a drop in bot/AI traffic.
I bet reddit and facebook are awfully quiet today.
slight drop - probably. i'd wager the drop in the ocean is because majority of the bot traffic are from it's cousins in China :>
Actually happened when internet went down in Iran
One of the sources:
>Scottish independence accounts go dark after Iran internet blackout
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/12/scottish-ind...
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What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
It seems to have somehow escaped your notice that Russia has been storming Ukraine for almost 5 years.
> I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine
As opposed to right now where they are the best of friends?
> I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine
In which ways does the situation where "most Russians turn on Ukraine" differ from the current reality?
I think you missed the news, war is going on for 5 years already, and yet russians don't do jack shit about it
The war has public support in russia, even though russia is trying to genocide ukrainians (see Bucha). How much more can they "turn on Ukraine"?
Ask Nicholas II.
There are two points to answer this question. First is that the majority of russian population supports the war, and the number of russians that are anti-war now but can become supporters of an aggression as results of these strikes is negligible.
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
Russian citizens have no voice anyway, so their opinion isn’t a part of equation about strikes planning. 90% of them support aggression anyway