RUSSIA’S AI RACE HIT A FIREWALL.

The real news

The story, straight

THE REAL NEWS

Ukraine hit three major data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex, one for Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and one for social media platform VKontakte during drone attacks in October.

People and businesses across Russia reported widespread interruptions to cloud services, banking, e-commerce, geolocation and ride-hailing. Yandex’s Alisa virtual assistant and multimodal AI chatbots also suffered disruptions.

THE ABSURD

The cloud discovered gravity. Turns out putting the digital economy in giant buildings works beautifully right up until the buildings become targets.

THE BREAKDOWN

The effects went beyond websites loading slowly. The Associated Press reported that disruptions reached banking, online shopping, maps, taxis and AI services.

Russia’s arbitration courts were also reportedly forced to cancel or postpone some sessions and lost access to databases. Experts told AP that repairs could take months or even years, while some warned Russia’s AI ambitions could be significantly set back.

THE UPSIDE

Resilience just became the next AI benchmark. The story is a reminder that an AI race is not only about models, chips and benchmarks.

The physical infrastructure underneath them matters too. Distributed capacity, backups and recovery planning become much more important when compute itself can become a point of failure.