Wars have long targeted bridges, stations, power plants and refineries. In the war between Russia and Ukraine, a new target has emerged: data centres, those vast buildings full of servers that run our digital services and our artificial intelligence.
What happened
According to the Associated Press, Ukrainian drones struck three of the main data centres of Yandex, the Russian technology giant, this month, as well as a centre belonging to Sberbank, the country's largest bank, which also hosted AI operations, and a centre of the social network VKontakte, Russia's equivalent of Facebook.
Yandex acknowledged that operations at one of its sites, near the city of Vladimir, had been entirely suspended. The company says it restored most of its essential services in the following days by switching to other centres.
The strikes followed Russian attacks on data centres in Ukraine, which had disrupted internet access and television broadcasting.
Why they are targets
A data centre is a particularly vulnerable target. They are very large buildings, easy to spot, filled with fragile equipment that depends on a permanent power supply and cooling. A single hit can be enough to stop everything.
And in Russia, the consequences are multiplied by concentration. A specialist interviewed by AP compares Yandex to Uber, Amazon and Google rolled into a single company, whose services all rest on just a few centres.
Experts believe these strikes will delay Russian AI research even further, already behind the United States and China. Sanctions prevent Russia from easily buying the advanced American chips needed to replace the destroyed hardware, and the global chip shortage makes repairs long and costly.
The Ukrainian president even claimed that activity from fake accounts on social networks declined after the strikes. A tempting claim, but one that has not been demonstrated.
In February 2022, a few days before the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Parliament urgently passed a law allowing the state to store its data outside the country. In the weeks that followed, with the help of major cloud companies, Ukraine transferred a large part of its essential public data (registers, tax records, civil status records) to servers located in allied countries. This decision allowed it to limit the damage of Russian strikes on its own infrastructure. A lesson in resilience that many countries have studied since.
A lesson for everyone
This war reveals a fragility that concerns everyone. As our services, our administrations and our economies depend on AI, data centres are becoming vital infrastructure, on a par with power plants. And like them, they can be targeted.
The question ties in with that of sovereignty, which the British government's advisers raised this week: where is our data, who controls it, and what would happen if we were deprived of it overnight? The many planned large data centres, in France too, will have to factor in this security question.
What to take away
AI needs buildings, cables and electricity. This very physical reality makes it as vulnerable as any other infrastructure.
In today's conflicts, striking data centres means striking a country's economy, information and research all at once. War has entered the AI era through the most concrete door there is.