There are also initiatives supporting Ukraine in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and other countries. Please suggest foundations from your country in the comments.
Blue Yellow - a Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military: https://blue-yellow.lt/en/ (you can specify the purpose for which you are donating, e.g. drones)
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
If in doubt - pick Come Back Alive. They have spotless reputation and invest into long-term projects such as military education and veteran sports/aid.
Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.
Within the narrow scope of this
discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
I work for a Ukrainian product firm and interviewed around 50 people in the last quarter for in-office work. Some of them are migrants discouraged by european salaries where an entry-level IT professional can make as much as a waiter.
From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to December 2025, 14,999 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 40,601 injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU).
> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
Great. When do you plan to start hitting data centres in the USA and Israel? Just you remind ordinary Americans and Israelis that killing ordinary civilians around the world is not good.
One goal is probably to show average Russians that the war is not just something which happens somewhere else in the world - a side-note on the news, no need to bother about.
The question why people who do not agree with the government should also pay the price for a war started by their government/country is not specific to this war.
The best the world can do is move away from US treasuries and importing from the US, causing long term economic decline. This applies the pain broadly to the US electorate who voted for this.
You make it seem as if they are not active targets for many. Its just really, really hard to attack a datacenter in the US with a ballistic missile. Israel gets hit pretty regularly as well.
The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home. The moment it starts, the populance starts pulling back support. But if you are shooting random people in the desert and middletown nowhere's McDonald's are functioning, its all gravy.
Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Building any appreciable amount of compute capacity (on the scale of, let's say, a single large datacenter in northern VA) inside a mountain also becomes a huge heat rejection problem, since with the exception of the 0.00000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a SM fiber cable, 100% of the energy consumed is turned into heat.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
It might be possible to do on the cheap; underground mines get decommissioned from time to time and could be repurposed as a data centre.
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Except that doing this at scale is currently still a pipe dream. Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure
I don't have specific information about Yandex but don't forget how heavily involved Amazon were with things like: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/world/europe/ukraine-cybe... it wouldn't be a huge stretch to suggest that a lot of cloud hosting providers are neck deep in national security.
That's probably not going to help much. Ukraine has been able to hit targets very far inland with drones. They are also rapidly making advances in ballistic missile development. FP-7 has a range of 200-300km, their new FP-9 will have a range of up to 855km and an accuracy of 20m. I know that Russia is (extremely) large, but with development going at this pace...
From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
Lots of civilian government agencies also use Azure for government / AWS GovCloud data centers because they’re FedRAMP compliant. It’s not just the DoD.
The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.
Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)
Watch as all the good patriotic soccer mom bots with AI generated midwestern white lady profile photos disappear from X and similar social media all suspiciously at the same time.
I'm reading schleck8 comment as accusing Yandex ASN as malicious on grounds of having higher bot % traffic than Scaleway / comparably sized Cloud Provider.
It could be malicious, but that exact stat doesn't show that.
Implication was that tons of malicious traffic originate from there. I pointed out that bot % stat doesn't seem to be useful for determining that, Occam's razor and all.
It isn't. It doesn't affect Yandex's own services, but ruins thousands of businesses and projects hosted there. Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Any remaining foreign companies doing business domestically in Russia (that thought they needed to host things in a Yandex datacenter) should be completely unsurprised by this result. As for the domestic Russians, there's a magical solution, when every square cm of Ukrainian territory is back in the hands of the UA forces, and the Russians have withdrawn back across the border, the strikes on datacenters will stop.
I am not a Russian shill. I fully support Ukraine and do not support the Russian war crimes. This doesn't help stop them, it just harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship.
Putin is a psychopath who doesn't care about anything. He gets money for the war anywhere he can. If 99% of the Russian economy gets destroyed, he'd redirect the remaining 1% to fully fund the war.
If literally 99% of the Russian economy was destroyed, no matter how currently oppressed they presently are, the Russian people are likely to rise up and remove Putin. It'll be bloody as all hell but if the economy were to truly and completely collapse (let's say, all refineries were severely hit and taken out of commission for months), it would happen.
Putin does not have absolute power entirely on his own (no dictator truly does). He can only continue with what he is doing because the Russian population on average either actively supports him or is not working against him.
"harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship."
The vast majority of Russians loved the war mostly because they made lots of money from it. Just when Ukraine started hitting oil infra people no longer liked the war. I am sorry for those 10% of Russians who didn't want the war and can't move abroad.
20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections before it was illegally removed from the ballots, and many more don't support the war. The people who do are mostly old or live in small towns with no access to education. I doubt many of them are Yandex Cloud users.
Surveys on the approval of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 showed numbers between 80% - 90% of people approving the war.
I assume - one would need to check - that the majority of people who left Russia after 2022 did not support the war, so those left should be on the lower end.
"20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections"
Yes, as I've said, approval dropped when Ukraine hit oil infra and gas prices went up, I can see 20% as a number. Nevertheless as show by approval ratings after 2014, that number was lower until people got hit by the impact of the war themselves.
Families of people who signed up for the war got large amounts of money. The transfer of money from the Russian national wealth fund into the economy, together with the shortage of workers, increased salaries.
This is what happens in wars - beside war racketeers - salaries go up. There is a lot of research on how German profited from WW2 (and before) for example for most of the war. WW2 too seems most researched from what I see on how everyone profits until things get worse and end.
As far as I'm concerned, Ukraine can do no wrong in this conflict (within reason obviously). Russia has been hitting civilian targets, specifically trying to take civilian lives, since day one.
The more damage Ukraine does to them the better. Maybe then these Russians who allegedly don't like Putin will get their shit together and do something about him. He's their responsibility. They are, like it or not, supporting his war simply by existing in the Russian economy. If the entire country really wanted him gone they could get him gone.
One important part of the war is to break up the 'deal' Putin has with the Russian population where he can stay in power and do what he likes so long as he doesn't mess with their lives too much. It's important that the everyday Russian is woken up to the realities of the war because it's ultimately them that will be stopping it, one way or another.
The billionaire tech oligarchs are owners of other Russian big tech, and they all have their own data centers. Some of them also have their own cloud services, so if anything this just redirects the money to them from Yandex Cloud.
> Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Interesting take. Last I checked, those datacenters hosted software that targeted a children's school.
You people keep thinking this kind of reasoning is some kind of gotcha. It really isn't. All citizens of the US carry responsibility for the crimes you did over the last half century.
There are a lot of them and not many of the dictators and his cronies. They could all do an uprising. It’s funny that a country with so much history of rebellion have leaders who have become so complacent
You know the Zeds attacked Ukrainian internet providers , attacked hospitals, train stations etc , do Zeds really expect that that Ukrainians are less capable than Ruzzians of doing the same? Or the Zeds are surprised that the decadent West is not forcing Ukraine to be kind and gentle with the "innocents" in Moscow, those poor Moscowites can't good when the AA is firing and now they might not have access to memes and videos either.
I don't blame Ukraine for doing this. I understand it fully. Russia invades and attacks them, they defend and attack back. That's what war is. But I don't understand the people on HN saying this attack is somehow "good" for anyone.
The tech sector in russia was fully centralized and monopolized prior to war. Destruction of the monopolies infrastructure (i hope sberbank, mailru, vk and the rest will be followed upon) will force russians to rebuild their tech sector in a healthy competitive way once the war is over. Treat drones as reactive anti-trust measures.
It is good if for example your country is invaded by rubots, like in Romanian election, you got Ruzzian bot famrs involved in promoting candidates agaisnt the election laws. I mean you get a candidate getting 50k likes from accounts in Asia a few seoncs after posintg soem video in Tik tok , it is obvious it was fake content and it was linked to Ruzzian citizens bot farms.
I hope that Putin will not attack again the electricity and power in Ukraine , hopefully the retard is scared now that Ukraine will bring the cold to the Moscowites and I am not happy for the children in Moscow to suffer because of the adults not giving a shit about the criminal they elected.
Russia's economy was always much less diversified than any western country even before the war but now what is even left as legitimate businesses nowadays? It's just the war machine and income to fund it, mainly from raw materials.
And I'm sure these data centers were also used for military purposes, no way they weren't in the current russian environment.
While I appreciate the sentiment, the decline of American/Western companies into modern Puritanism is nothing new - but considering the staunch conservatism of the average Russian, I’d say they would do the same thing if they could, they just don’t have the engineering capacity to do the same thing.
If you want to help Ukraine, here is a list of the largest volunteer funds you can donate to:
Come Back Alive - delivered the first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation - bought the famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom - US-based foundation https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/
Canada-Ukraine Foundation: https://www.cufoundation.ca/
Ukrainian World Congress: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Exen - Polish volunteer who delivers used vehicles to the front https://pomagam.pl/4x4dlaukrainy
United24 - the government fund https://u24.gov.ua/
There are also initiatives supporting Ukraine in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and other countries. Please suggest foundations from your country in the comments.
Blue Yellow - a Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military: https://blue-yellow.lt/en/ (you can specify the purpose for which you are donating, e.g. drones)
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
If I can add one, this Canadian NGO is also organizing winter aid efforts for Ukrainian civilians: https://www.cufoundation.ca/
And this group: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Thank you, updated
Thank you for posting this! I regularly donate through United24.
Also, Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en and 69th Sniffing Brigade is doing awesome work: https://www.help99.co/donate?utm_source=x.com&utm_medium=69
Glory to the Heroes!
If in doubt - pick Come Back Alive. They have spotless reputation and invest into long-term projects such as military education and veteran sports/aid.
Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.
Yep, most of talent has left
Could you elaborate? What does this mean?
There were several waves of Russians fleeing [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_...
(This is incomplete, I think there is a fourth or a fifth wave, probably since about summer 2026.)
It means you shouldn't invade your neighbours and conscript your young people or you will ruin your economy.
I hope the MAGA folk threatening Canada take note.
just neighbours?
> just neighbours?
Within the narrow scope of this discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
Just neighbours, otherwise people might draw awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations.
> awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently.
That anyone with a few brain cells and enough rubels has left the country
A lot of people who could get out of Russia after the war started, did get out.
Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.
> this applies also to Ukraine
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
[1] https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/gradual-market-stabilization-wh...
I work for a Ukrainian product firm and interviewed around 50 people in the last quarter for in-office work. Some of them are migrants discouraged by european salaries where an entry-level IT professional can make as much as a waiter.
Ones who didn't are asking stupid questions...
Cyprus, Georgia, UAE
Great! More news like this
Maybe this would remind ordinary russians that killing innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good
40.000 - 100.000 dead civilians.
Estimate range is big because lots of civilians died in cities that ended up occupied.
What is this number referring to? When I google it I only find chechen war, gaza, and US gun deaths annually
Mariupol's civilian casualties are hard to establish. Some of the upper estimates run to 100,000 killed. Over just a couple of months.
The number is referring to the post I replied to:
"innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good".
Estimations for how many civilians Russians killed in Chechnya range from 45,000 to 80,000.
They were asking for a reference/source, not to be treated like an idiot.
"What is this number referring to?"
Does not sound like looking for a source, but I'm not a native speaker.
I am. You are correct.
I suppose they’re mixing up deaths with injuries
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/ukrai...> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
i mean, presumably so could ukraine?
Yes, capitulate to the attacker. Cease to exist as a country, nation, people, culture. Presumably that is an option!
How could Ukraine stop the Russian invasion?
If Ukraine ceased military activity, why do you think Russia wouldn't continue their invasion?
1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
It's likely much higher considering the completely destroyed cities and towns. E.g. Mariupol had a population of 450 000 before the war.
Also helps with removing bots from X (to much of Elon's disagreement)
Great. When do you plan to start hitting data centres in the USA and Israel? Just you remind ordinary Americans and Israelis that killing ordinary civilians around the world is not good.
US-owned datacenters in the middle east were already blown up with the drone family that Russia has been mass-procuring from Iran
One goal is probably to show average Russians that the war is not just something which happens somewhere else in the world - a side-note on the news, no need to bother about.
The question why people who do not agree with the government should also pay the price for a war started by their government/country is not specific to this war.
The best the world can do is move away from US treasuries and importing from the US, causing long term economic decline. This applies the pain broadly to the US electorate who voted for this.
You make it seem as if they are not active targets for many. Its just really, really hard to attack a datacenter in the US with a ballistic missile. Israel gets hit pretty regularly as well.
The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home. The moment it starts, the populance starts pulling back support. But if you are shooting random people in the desert and middletown nowhere's McDonald's are functioning, its all gravy.
The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home.
Have you checked the diesel prices?
Why do you make it sound like a rhetorical question?
Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Scaleway built one of their Paris AZs in a nuclear fallout shelter: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/meet-fr-par-3/
Datacenters are full of valuable computers and related equipment, but building the equivalent space under a mountain will cost a crazy amount.
Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.
Building any appreciable amount of compute capacity (on the scale of, let's say, a single large datacenter in northern VA) inside a mountain also becomes a huge heat rejection problem, since with the exception of the 0.00000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a SM fiber cable, 100% of the energy consumed is turned into heat.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
So they want to build it in space. Trade one heat problem for another, but put it completely out of range (for most attackers).
Pionen in sweden is a datacenter in a bunker. The Pirate Bay used to be hosted there.
A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
neat. why can't you put the heat in the mountain?
For broadly the same reason that many years of heat from braking has heat-saturated the london underground.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=london+un...
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
The bunkers are already out there e.g. limestone mines in US, Italy,
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...
Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
It might be possible to do on the cheap; underground mines get decommissioned from time to time and could be repurposed as a data centre.
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Except that doing this at scale is currently still a pipe dream. Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...
Until someone blows up a satellite and creates enough shrapnel that every other satellite is destroyed.
I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure
Also Russia has been targeting Ukrainian digital infrastructure so they make these things fair game IMO.
I don't have specific information about Yandex but don't forget how heavily involved Amazon were with things like: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/world/europe/ukraine-cybe... it wouldn't be a huge stretch to suggest that a lot of cloud hosting providers are neck deep in national security.
Military personnel use the same Yandex services as regular people: delivery, maps, taxi, etc.
Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.
They will probably start building DCs in Siberia. Cheap cooling!
That's probably not going to help much. Ukraine has been able to hit targets very far inland with drones. They are also rapidly making advances in ballistic missile development. FP-7 has a range of 200-300km, their new FP-9 will have a range of up to 855km and an accuracy of 20m. I know that Russia is (extremely) large, but with development going at this pace...
Power and data has to come from somewhere for those bunkers. Every fiber hut and power substation becomes a target. Can they all be protected? No.
From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
> Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
Or will we see civilian datacenters with their own defensive drone swarms, and a couple of phalanx-style point defence systems for good measure?
This should have a material impact on SpaceX stock. Wouldn't it be much easier to harden datacenters against attack under ground than in space?
No, just more underground construction
And sky rocketing (...) prices
It would be cheaper for most businesses to just go on prem again.
Should likely share https://status.yandex.cloud/en/timeline as well, though it only shows two of them being hit, not three.
data centers are civilian targets and globally very poorly defended. if this starts to escalate.. you think ram is expensive now..
They are often dual-use targets today.
Example quote from Azure documentation:
> Azure Government is used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) entities to deploy a broad range of workloads and solutions.
Calling such a DC a civilian target is essentialy incorrect now, and has been for years.
Lots of civilian government agencies also use Azure for government / AWS GovCloud data centers because they’re FedRAMP compliant. It’s not just the DoD.
https://status.yandex.cloud/
Ironically, doesn't open for me at the moment :)
3rd cloud data center so far.
They only have 3. At least, the main ones
Reuters says “Yandex operates five data centres” [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
Looks like 4 in Russia, 1 in Kazakhstan if you select the Zones drop down on the status page.
My information may be outdated, but the others are much smaller and less relevant
Well, that was fast then. Maybe /somebody/ shouldn't have targeted Parkova data center and mobile network cores.
Is https://habr.com normally down?
https://uptimerobot.habr.com doesn't say it's down, but it time outs.
They should start putting data centers underground like deep under central park
Massive data/compute centers should be replace to lot of mini data/compute centers in our homes.
Is it yandex ir nebius?:)
Nice! Keep it up boys!
How many major DCs are there in Russia?
Everything is fair in love and war. Unless the war stops, they can completely destroy each other.
The general decency of condemning any/all types destruction won't apply here.
This sounds like you're equating the defender's right to counterattack with the attacker's right to continue the attack?
tough luck
I was going to use Yandex search for find an extremely tiny violin to play, but the yandex search is broken. Oh well.
The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.
Refreshing is also a wording. Drone attack during the war is called "an incident".
Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)
What's an alternative way to find torrents if Yandex goes down?
run your own dht crawler
1337x.to works just fine
But how on earth are they able to penetrate through all their defensives
Bold of you to assume they have many defenses left.
Russian air defence equipment bad, organised even worse, and has been severely degraded over 4 years now.
Great!
How is this “great”?
Bot traffic by ASN
Yandex: > 99 % https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as13238
Scaleway: 90 % https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as12876
Watch as all the good patriotic soccer mom bots with AI generated midwestern white lady profile photos disappear from X and similar social media all suspiciously at the same time.
Scaleway doesn't have a search engine?
Google ASN is at 98.7% https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as15169
Both of them are search engines; web page crawling is what they do; What did you expect?
I'm reading schleck8 comment as accusing Yandex ASN as malicious on grounds of having higher bot % traffic than Scaleway / comparably sized Cloud Provider.
It could be malicious, but that exact stat doesn't show that.
I never understood whataboutism.
It's not whataboutism to call out a proving too much fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
Where you saw whataboutism?
Implication was that tons of malicious traffic originate from there. I pointed out that bot % stat doesn't seem to be useful for determining that, Occam's razor and all.
And bot traffic from Yandex is down 100% as of this moment according to the graphs.
People on X comment on the noticeable drop in bot comments.
Agree: not great not terrible.
Great will be when all huge data center are visited by free range unknown drones, like what happened to the Wildberries.
It's in Russia, that's why.
It's just karma, Russians fascists reaping what they sow.
It isn't. It doesn't affect Yandex's own services, but ruins thousands of businesses and projects hosted there. Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Any remaining foreign companies doing business domestically in Russia (that thought they needed to host things in a Yandex datacenter) should be completely unsurprised by this result. As for the domestic Russians, there's a magical solution, when every square cm of Ukrainian territory is back in the hands of the UA forces, and the Russians have withdrawn back across the border, the strikes on datacenters will stop.
"Russians have withdrawn back across the border, the strikes on datacenters will stop."
I'm also surprised that people can't see this simple solution to the situation.
I did not expect Russian shills on Hackernews.
Destroying heating units in Ukraine also affects innocent users in much worse ways than losing a datacenter.
I am not a Russian shill. I fully support Ukraine and do not support the Russian war crimes. This doesn't help stop them, it just harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship.
You understand that a country's military capacity depends on its economy right?
Putin is a psychopath who doesn't care about anything. He gets money for the war anywhere he can. If 99% of the Russian economy gets destroyed, he'd redirect the remaining 1% to fully fund the war.
If literally 99% of the Russian economy was destroyed, no matter how currently oppressed they presently are, the Russian people are likely to rise up and remove Putin. It'll be bloody as all hell but if the economy were to truly and completely collapse (let's say, all refineries were severely hit and taken out of commission for months), it would happen.
Putin does not have absolute power entirely on his own (no dictator truly does). He can only continue with what he is doing because the Russian population on average either actively supports him or is not working against him.
Same millions of random people who eager to enlist, travel thouthands kilometers and die in a ditch in Ukraine in exchange for some extra cash.
Same random people who works and support military machine with money and labor.
"harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship."
The vast majority of Russians loved the war mostly because they made lots of money from it. Just when Ukraine started hitting oil infra people no longer liked the war. I am sorry for those 10% of Russians who didn't want the war and can't move abroad.
Where is 10% coming from?
20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections before it was illegally removed from the ballots, and many more don't support the war. The people who do are mostly old or live in small towns with no access to education. I doubt many of them are Yandex Cloud users.
Surveys on the approval of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 showed numbers between 80% - 90% of people approving the war.
I assume - one would need to check - that the majority of people who left Russia after 2022 did not support the war, so those left should be on the lower end.
"20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections"
Yes, as I've said, approval dropped when Ukraine hit oil infra and gas prices went up, I can see 20% as a number. Nevertheless as show by approval ratings after 2014, that number was lower until people got hit by the impact of the war themselves.
How did they make money from the war? The war is a huge burden on the Russian economy
Families of people who signed up for the war got large amounts of money. The transfer of money from the Russian national wealth fund into the economy, together with the shortage of workers, increased salaries.
This is what happens in wars - beside war racketeers - salaries go up. There is a lot of research on how German profited from WW2 (and before) for example for most of the war. WW2 too seems most researched from what I see on how everyone profits until things get worse and end.
Sounds accurate!
As far as I'm concerned, Ukraine can do no wrong in this conflict (within reason obviously). Russia has been hitting civilian targets, specifically trying to take civilian lives, since day one.
The more damage Ukraine does to them the better. Maybe then these Russians who allegedly don't like Putin will get their shit together and do something about him. He's their responsibility. They are, like it or not, supporting his war simply by existing in the Russian economy. If the entire country really wanted him gone they could get him gone.
One important part of the war is to break up the 'deal' Putin has with the Russian population where he can stay in power and do what he likes so long as he doesn't mess with their lives too much. It's important that the everyday Russian is woken up to the realities of the war because it's ultimately them that will be stopping it, one way or another.
You don’t suppose it harms the billionaire oligarch shareholders more than the pizza shop that happens to run a website?
The billionaire tech oligarchs are owners of other Russian big tech, and they all have their own data centers. Some of them also have their own cloud services, so if anything this just redirects the money to them from Yandex Cloud.
> Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Interesting take. Last I checked, those datacenters hosted software that targeted a children's school.
Innocent users who voted for killing tens of thousands of civilians in Ukraine.
I guess for some definition of "innocent".
How do you know how they voted ? By this logic there not a single innocent in the United States or Israel either.
You people keep thinking this kind of reasoning is some kind of gotcha. It really isn't. All citizens of the US carry responsibility for the crimes you did over the last half century.
Oh no
What about the innocent users who didn't? Russia is not a democracy.
There are a lot of them and not many of the dictators and his cronies. They could all do an uprising. It’s funny that a country with so much history of rebellion have leaders who have become so complacent
I'm sorry for those of the 11 percent innocent (1) that are left there, happy that many fled the dictatorship.
(1) 89% of Russians approved Putin and the 2014 Crimean invasion
> 89% of Russians approved Putin
According to Putin.
No according to different pollsters.
Lewada, the pollster which got sacked later as a "foreign agent", got 86%
Those aren’t real elections.
seems like Russia has achieved the paradoxical form of government where it is both a perfect direct democracy and a fascist dictatorship
You know the Zeds attacked Ukrainian internet providers , attacked hospitals, train stations etc , do Zeds really expect that that Ukrainians are less capable than Ruzzians of doing the same? Or the Zeds are surprised that the decadent West is not forcing Ukraine to be kind and gentle with the "innocents" in Moscow, those poor Moscowites can't good when the AA is firing and now they might not have access to memes and videos either.
I don't blame Ukraine for doing this. I understand it fully. Russia invades and attacks them, they defend and attack back. That's what war is. But I don't understand the people on HN saying this attack is somehow "good" for anyone.
The tech sector in russia was fully centralized and monopolized prior to war. Destruction of the monopolies infrastructure (i hope sberbank, mailru, vk and the rest will be followed upon) will force russians to rebuild their tech sector in a healthy competitive way once the war is over. Treat drones as reactive anti-trust measures.
It is good if for example your country is invaded by rubots, like in Romanian election, you got Ruzzian bot famrs involved in promoting candidates agaisnt the election laws. I mean you get a candidate getting 50k likes from accounts in Asia a few seoncs after posintg soem video in Tik tok , it is obvious it was fake content and it was linked to Ruzzian citizens bot farms.
I hope that Putin will not attack again the electricity and power in Ukraine , hopefully the retard is scared now that Ukraine will bring the cold to the Moscowites and I am not happy for the children in Moscow to suffer because of the adults not giving a shit about the criminal they elected.
Russia's economy was always much less diversified than any western country even before the war but now what is even left as legitimate businesses nowadays? It's just the war machine and income to fund it, mainly from raw materials.
And I'm sure these data centers were also used for military purposes, no way they weren't in the current russian environment.
Incorrect, and the mental gymnastics at play here is rather telling
>you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran
Huh?
Yandex is the best search engine for stuff banned by the "rotten wect" btw. F Google
While I appreciate the sentiment, the decline of American/Western companies into modern Puritanism is nothing new - but considering the staunch conservatism of the average Russian, I’d say they would do the same thing if they could, they just don’t have the engineering capacity to do the same thing.
not for long
Roskomnadzor are laughing their asses off reading this comment.