Updated

The Moscow Times reported on November 11, 2026, that Ukrainian drone strikes in October on data centers operated by Sber and Yandex are adding to the strain on Russia's drive to build sovereign artificial intelligence. The report said the effort was already struggling before the strikes, with limited grid capacity in Moscow and St. Petersburg, high construction costs, sanctions and shortages of advanced chips and electricity slowing expansion. The facilities hit accounted for roughly 11% of Russia's data center capacity, and Kommersant reported that full repairs could take up to six months. Yandex said it had restored access to about 97% of affected cloud customer data and that the remaining 3% was permanently lost, while an online teacher said a Yandex-based platform was still disrupted this month. The article gave no figures on damage beyond these and no official Russian response was reported. It also said that building underground would cost 40% more and that Russia falls outside the top 10 in Stanford's AI Vibrancy ranking and a UN assessment.