• by Laurie Sullivan , 9 hours ago

The Kremlin in Moscow is investigating how much financial loss Yandex -- which supports AI and search in Russia -- has incurred after last week's drone attack on three of its data centers.

One of the data centers is used to train its AI models.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was too early to assess whether users had suffered financial losses from outages, Reuters reported.

Asked by Reuters whether the government was considering a mechanism to ‌compensate users, he said Yandex was "currently facing difficulties," adding that "the matter is being discussed by the government, but the company is taking urgent steps to address the consequences of the attack."

Media reports in Russia are calling Yandex,Russia’s largest technology company." Last week it announced that two of its data centers were struck by drones. “Serious" damage was reported at all three locations.

In a statement posted on Friday, Yandex said operations at its Sasovo facility were “completely halted,” while part of the infrastructure in Kaluga was “disabled.”

The Vladimir facility was taken completely offline on Sunday, according to the company.

"Data centers are the 'iron heart' of Yandex," according to a post on the company’s website translated into English from Russian. “Their operability is critical for services that have become part of people's everyday lives. Millions of users check traffic and build routes, listen to music, watch movies, order groceries, and get answers to questions. Our technologies help hundreds of thousands of companies run their businesses: taking orders, serving customers, and interacting with partners.”

Following the attacks on the Sasovo and Kaluga facilities, a third Ukrainian drone strike hit Yandex's Vladimir data center on Sunday, Oct. 11, forcing a complete shutdown of operations at that site.

The Sasovo data center is noted for housing two of Yandex's top supercomputers equipped with Nvidia A100 chips used to train its YandexGPT AI models.

Chinese conglomerates represent one of the largest foreign ad segments on Yandex today that leverages search, video, and geotargeted navigation ads across Yandex Maps and Navigator, according to Google Gemini.

These recent targeted drone strikes hit a company still trying to recover from a recent restructuring following a corporate split in 2024.

Yandex is based in Russia. It has retained the brand’s name and continues to operate as Russia's leading search engine and AI lead. Its Dutch parent company rebranded as Nebius Group.

Yandex still dominates domestic search with the most market share in the region, but it is currently battling infrastructure challenges after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted several of its data centers and supercomputers.

In 2024, Yandex NV, the parent company of the Russian search engine at the time, agreed to sell its assets in Russia to a group of local investors for $5.2 billion in one of the largest corporate exits from Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Nebius Group, which now focuses on AI, found that its shares fell 2% on Tuesday -- opening at $200.50 versus a prior close of $210.06, while trading volume reached nearly 6.94 million shares, according to MarketBeat.

The company does not sell advertising space or operate an advertising network. Unlike its predecessor Yandex, focused on digital advertising, Nebius has completely exited the consumer-facing ad-tech industry.