AI Infrastructure

Vol. 1·Friday, November 6, 2026

Who Pays When Drones Hit Data Centers? What Yandex's and AWS's Contracts Say

Drones hit three Yandex data centers in four days in October and AWS facilities in the Gulf in March, and AWS later said it could not restore data hosted exclusively in the damaged Gulf locations. On their face, the contracts leave recovery with the customer, the providers waived bills by choice, and war cover is thin.


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Who Pays When Drones Hit Data Centers? What Yandex's and AWS's Contracts Say

At 22:31 UTC on October 7th, Yandex Cloud's public status page posted a notice that read like routine maintenance: "Power outages are observed in the ru-central1-b availability zone."[1] Thirteen hours later the same page gave the cause. "The cause of the incident was a fire that occurred as a result of a UAV attack on the Yandex data center in Sasovo," it said, adding that "The data center has been completely shut down."[1]

NASA's fire-tracking satellites picked up a blaze on the site at about 2 a.m. local time,[2] and the region's governor said a roof had caught fire and windows had been blown out in several homes in the district.[3] The data center had opened in 2014, and local officials had once called it "an extremely promising high-tech enterprise," in our translation of The Insider's report.[2]

Over the next four days Yandex's status page recorded two more strikes and the company's scramble to move customers elsewhere. Overnight into October 9th, drones hit a second Yandex site, in Kaluga, where the company said "several data center modules have been completely disabled."[4] That morning Yandex told its cloud customers it had arranged for three Russian rivals, Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud, to take in their workloads, and gave them a code word to use when they applied: "CloudBro."[1]

The CloudBro arrangement was Yandex's first answer to who bears the loss: it passed its customers to competitors. Yandex isn't the first cloud provider to keep this kind of log. In March, during the war between Iran and the United States and Israel, drones struck two Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain, and in September AWS said it couldn't restore the data that customers had kept only in its Bahrain region. Two operators, each on the receiving end of a different war, have now told customers on their own status pages to fall back on backups: AWS said the damage exceeded what its regional and multi-zone services were designed to withstand, and Yandex urged customers to use other disaster recovery plans. The contracts behind those status pages leave the data, and on their face the work of recovering it, with the customer, and the filings and insurance markets around them show how thinly the rest of the loss is covered.

On October 10th Yandex moved to "fully manual management of quotas for computing resources and disks."[1] Early on Sunday, October 11th, came the third strike: "As a result of the UAV attack, the infrastructure of Yandex's data center in Vladimir was damaged. The data center's operation has been completely suspended."[5] In the same notice Yandex told the customers still running on its platform that its "operating mode is emergency" and recommended "using any other alternative disaster recovery plans."[5] Fontanka reported that two substations supplying 5,000 residents had been switched off and that people were being evacuated from the homes closest to the site.[6] Satellite images published over the following week showed damage across a third of the Sasovo building, its roof blackened at the western end,[7] and to at least five of the Vladimir center's buildings.[8]

By Monday evening the incident was still open, with 82 services attached to it, the YandexGPT API among them, and the platform "operates in a limited mode."[5] Yandex's payments arm spent the weekend reassuring people. "The money itself isn't stored in the data center," said Dima Pirogov, who runs the company's fintech business. "That's where the servers that power our services are located."[9] Under Pirogov's own post, people left more than 5,200 comments about mortgages, credit cards and payments they couldn't make, Mediazona found in a roundup of the complaints; the translations are ours. "My mortgage payment is due today, tomorrow I have to pay back the credit card, and I'd like to eat," one wrote. Elsewhere in the roundup, a smart-home user put it more briefly: "I went to sleep in a smart home and woke up in a dumb one."[10]

Alexander Savitsky, whose dating app Pulse ran on Yandex Cloud, told Reuters he couldn't reach his backup there. "We have no confirmation of actual data loss, but the situation is serious: the project represents three years of work," he said.[11]

Recovery has been partial. Selectel, one of the three rivals Yandex had sent customers to, was soon short of room. By October 14th its status page was headed "Limited capacity" and warned, "we cannot currently guarantee availability or reserve resources"; on October 22nd it stopped the creation of new storage buckets in all its pools, reopening it region by region from the 26th.[12] On October 23rd Yandex began opening a replacement availability zone "in a new location," with access rolled out in stages, in our translation of its Russian announcement.[13] On October 29th it withdrew its forecast for the year, citing "additional external factors making it difficult to assess its financial results for the remainder of the year." The Moscow Times reported that the financial impact of the strikes "was not reflected in the third-quarter earnings report."[14]

Kyiv hasn't issued a formal military claim for the Yandex strikes.[15] Russia had been hitting Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications networks for a month, and on October 8th President Volodymyr Zelensky said, in Reuters' translation: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion." The next day he called the Kaluga strike "our tit-for-tat response."[11] A private Ukrainian drone maker, Fire Point, has said its FP-1 drones attacked the Vladimir site.[16] The campaign then widened beyond Yandex. On October 14th drones hit a Sberbank data center in Balakovo, which Reuters called Russia's biggest and which Marko Milanovic and Michael Schmitt, writing in Just Security, listed as "under construction"; Sberbank said its systems were "operating normally."[17][18] A VK data center outside St. Petersburg came under attack on October 18th; VK said its services were working normally, though Cybernews reported users seeing outages, with the cause unclear.[19] On October 23rd, a Ukrainian monitoring channel reported an attack on a Federal Tax Service data center in Gorodets, one of two duplicate sites for tax and civil registry records. Local officials reported "drone debris" and three injuries, and any damage to the facility hasn't been established.[20]

What the instruments saw

Yandex's account can be checked against data that doesn't depend on either side. IODA, an internet-outage project at Georgia Tech, constantly probes blocks of addresses on every network and counts how many answer. On Yandex Cloud's network, an average of about 518 address blocks responded in the nine days before the first strike. Between the Sasovo and Vladimir strikes the average was 341, about 66% of that pre-strike baseline, and after Vladimir it was 112, about 22%.[21] The count stayed near that level for two weeks, then began to climb after October 25th; by November 4th it averaged about 180, roughly 35% of the baseline.[21] Those are our figures, computed from IODA's raw ten-minute data; they measure whether addresses answer, not how many workloads ran or what data survived.

Responsive address blocks on Yandex Cloud's network, September 29 to November 4, 2026
Address blocks on Yandex Cloud's network (AS200350) answering IODA's probes, September 29 to November 4. Our chart, from IODA's raw ten-minute data.

The timing matches the status page closely. The Vladimir drop came in two ten-minute steps on October 11th, from 321 responding blocks at 01:40 UTC to 200 at 01:50 and 120 at 02:00, about an hour before Yandex's 03:08 UTC notice.[21] The routing data barely moved: the number of address ranges Yandex Cloud announced to the rest of the internet stayed at 857 or 858 through the strikes and the days after them, even though the addresses inside those ranges had stopped answering.[21] That pattern fits a facility outage rather than a routing fault, though IODA can't see the cause; the status page names it.

Another chart has been read more loosely. Cloudflare's count of automated traffic from Yandex's main network collapsed after the strikes, and Zelensky said that after them "it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms."[22] A researcher who runs the @antibot4navalny account, which tracks Russian online propaganda, told RFE/RL that the chart "has little to do with malicious propaganda bots on social media. It measures automated requests to websites."[22] Cybernews pointed out that Cloudflare's figure for bot traffic across Russia as a whole was "largely the same as in any other week."[23]

The Gulf came first

AWS's public health dashboard tells the earlier story in a drier register. On March 1st it reported that one availability zone in its UAE region had been hit by "objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire," and that the fire department had shut off power to the facility.[24] The next day it was explicit: "In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure."[24] AWS never named the attacker. Iran's Revolutionary Guards claimed responsibility and said they targeted the Bahrain facility for Amazon's support of the US military, CNBC reported,[25] and Iran's Fars News Agency said the strike was meant "to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy's military and intelligence activities."[26]

The outage reached the region's payment apps. The payments company Alaan blamed a "critical AWS outage caused by the ongoing regional situation," CNBC reported, listing Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank among the banks that also reported disruptions.[27] ADCB's mobile app was down for two days; its chief executive, Alaa Eraiqat, apologized "for the inconvenience experienced over the past 48 hours," but the bank did not say what caused the disruption, and The National reported it was unclear whether the AWS fire was involved.[28]

By April 30th AWS was telling Bahrain customers to "recover their resources in other Regions from remote backups."[24] On September 15th it gave its conclusion. "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region," the Bahrain notice said, and the UAE notice said the same of the zone hit on March 1st.[24] The damage, AWS wrote, "exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand."[24] It added that when the first zone was damaged it had begun recommending that customers move their workloads, "and most did so before the Region became unavailable."[24]

UNIDIR, the UN's disarmament research institute, called the March strikes "the first documented time that such commercial data centres have been deliberately targeted as part of a military operation."[29] That needs one footnote of its own: in February, Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces said they had hit a data center in Russian-occupied Prymorsk, a claim that rests on their own statement.[30] In April, Iran's military named the next target. In a video reported by TechCrunch, it said that "if the U.S. went ahead with its threats to hit its civilian infrastructure," Iran would strike back at US "energy and tech infrastructure" in the region, the Stargate AI campus in the UAE among it.[31] In October, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, named data centers, undersea internet cables and AI facilities in the Persian Gulf as targets "if the United States and Israel resume hostilities," Iran International reported.[32] The Register drew the comparison on October 9th, noting that if Yandex had to write off Sasovo it would be "the second cloud provider to lose facilities to drone attacks this year."[33]

Who pays

Start with the contract a cloud customer signs. The force majeure clause of the AWS Customer Agreement says that "except for payment obligations," neither AWS nor the customer is liable for failures caused by events beyond their control, a list that ends with "acts of terrorism, or war."[34] The same wording was already in the version of the agreement dated December 23rd, 2024, more than a year before the Gulf strikes.[35] The same agreement makes the customer responsible for taking "appropriate action to secure, protect and backup your accounts and Your Content."[34] The service-level agreement for AWS's compute service, which pays credits when servers go down, excludes outages "caused by factors outside of our reasonable control, including any force majeure event."[36]

On the face of those terms, a war excuses the outage while leaving the customer's payment obligations in place and its backups its own job, subject to the rest of the contract and local law. AWS waived charges anyway. In March it emailed UAE customers that it was "waiving all usage-related charges in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region for March 2026," which an AWS spokesperson confirmed by email in response to questions from CSO, as Network World reported.[37] Network World describes the waiver as covering customers of both the UAE and Bahrain facilities, though the email it quotes names only the UAE region.

Since April 30th the dashboard has said that "relevant billing operations are currently suspended" in both regions while AWS restores normal operations.[24] And we found no public statement from an AWS customer saying it lost data.

Yandex's next move came through its terms. On October 10th, two days after Sasovo, it updated its user agreement to exclude liability for failures caused by drone strikes and other attacks.[38] The new force majeure section lists "military actions and terrorist acts (including with the use of UAVs, missile weapons and other means of destruction)," in our translation of the Russian.[39]

The next day it republished the contract for Yandex Cloud, in force from October 22nd. The previous cloud contract already excused "military actions," but it required whoever invoked force majeure to supply "official documents certifying the existence of these circumstances."[40] The new one drops that requirement and adds a presumption: "Circumstances expressly listed in clause 11.2 are presumed to be force majeure," and a party disputing that has to prove otherwise.[41] Yandex told the Russian outlet RBC that the changes "are clarifying in nature and do not change existing legal mechanisms."[42]

Whether such wording holds up is contested. Sarkis Darbinyan, a cyber lawyer, argued in The Moscow Times on November 4th that Yandex's October 10th user agreement doesn't reach obligations breached before that date, and that under Article 428 of the Russian Civil Code a business that accepts a take-it-or-leave-it contract can demand changes to burdensome terms limiting the stronger party's liability. He also argued that a company that wrote drones into its contract will struggle to tell a court the risk was unforeseeable. Courts are split so far: one Moscow arbitration court accepted in June that a drone strike could be force majeure, another rejected a supplier's attempt in May, and neither ruling has entered legal force. It's one lawyer's opinion, written about Yandex, Wildberries and Beget together rather than about Yandex Cloud's contract in particular.[43]

Like AWS, Yandex also waived its bills of its own accord: on October 13th it made all its cloud services in Russia "free of charge for existing customers from October 8 through October 31, inclusive."[5]

A cloud can also fail without a drone. In the same week as the Sasovo strike, ransomware took down part of the East Japan cloud region of IDC Frontier, a Japanese data-center and cloud operator, affecting 495 companies and local governments.[44] When it became clear the platform couldn't be restored, customers such as the blogging-software maker Six Apart began rebuilding from their own backups on a rival's cloud.[45] On October 27th IDC Frontier said the attacker had got in through a vulnerability in open-source software it used, and that it had found no sign that data inside customers' virtual servers had leaked.[46]

The operators say little about what the damage cost them. In its first quarterly report after the March strikes, Amazon reported $447 million of other operating expense, up from $308 million a year earlier, and said it "was primarily related to charges associated with damaged data centers in the Middle East in Q1 2026, asset impairments, and the amortization of intangible assets."[47] It gave no separate figure for the data centers, and its next two quarterly reports dropped the reference: other operating expense came to $90 million in the second quarter and $134 million in the third, put down to asset impairments and amortization.[48][49] Of nineteen annual and quarterly reports filed since early 2025 by Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle that we read, including the quarterly reports filed in late October, only Oracle's annual report for fiscal 2026 added a new risk-factor sentence on the subject, warning that "physical damage to data centers or key energy infrastructure from natural disasters, geopolitical events, terrorist events or other catastrophic events could adversely affect our profitability."[50]

The companies that own the buildings many clouds rent are blunter. Equinix's annual report says its "insurance policies contain industry standard exclusions for events such as war and nuclear reaction."[51] Digital Realty's says it does "not carry insurance for generally uninsured exposures such as loss from war or nuclear reaction."[52]

Exclusions like these are standard, and the March strikes showed what happens to the cover that does exist. Joe Peiser, who runs Aon's Risk Capital business, told Semafor that before the war, data-center developers could buy up to $3 billion of war coverage for a single Gulf property. "Today the max we could probably do is $100 million," he said.[53] In Russia, Darbinyan wrote, Article 964 of the Civil Code exempts insurers from war losses unless the policy says otherwise.[43]

Where cover does exist, the wording of its war exclusion matters, and one appellate ruling shows how such a clause can be read. In Merck v. Ace, a New Jersey appeals court held that an exclusion for "hostile or warlike action by a government or sovereign power" "requires the involvement of military action," which let the drugmaker recover its losses from the NotPetya cyberattack.[54] A drone strike by a state's armed forces would meet that test far more plainly than NotPetya did, but that assumes the strike can be pinned on a state, and attribution is what's unsettled for the Yandex strikes: Kyiv hasn't issued a formal military claim,[15] and a private Ukrainian drone maker, Fire Point, has said its drones attacked the Vladimir site.[16] Any real claim would also turn on its own policy wording and facts.

Governments have their own answers. Ukraine's is the one it began in 2022, moving data out of reach. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's digital transformation minister, said in February 2025 that the country's first cloud-services law "was adopted a week before the start of a full-scale war. It allowed for the transfer of registries abroad and the storage of data in the clouds."[55] The government has now set aside "UAH 518.3 million (about US$11.5 million)" for "backup environments at separate locations, cloud infrastructure, and additional sites for state information systems," Ukrainska Pravda reported on October 4th.[56] That protects records better than it protects the networks people use every day, and Kateryna Chernohorenko, a former deputy minister of defense for digital transformation, warned that "you cannot move everything underground."[57]

In Russia, the state has turned to the military and to the private operators. Maksut Shadayev, the digital development minister, told a State Duma committee on October 12th that his ministry, "together with the Defense Ministry, is working on the issue of protecting these facilities."[58] On November 2nd President Vladimir Putin ordered owners of private data centers to "reserve 10% of their capacity" to keep the country's IT infrastructure running, and allowed temporary use of data centers abroad, "subject to approval by the FSB."[59]

Who owned and insured the buildings that were actually hit hasn't been disclosed.

What the law allows

A cloud customer's exposure to a strike depends partly on who else is in the building, and the law of targeting turns on exactly that. At Sasovo, the data center sits on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, which is on several Western sanctions lists; the governor's statement spoke only of "one of the enterprises," and nobody has said what the drones were aimed at.[60] Whether the drones were aimed at the cloud or at the factory around it, the law offers no list of targetable buildings, only a test, and the rules on proportionality and precautions apply after it. Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions limits military objectives to objects that "by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage."[61] Article 52(3) adds a presumption: where it's in doubt whether an object normally used for civilian purposes is contributing to military action, "it shall be presumed not to be so used."[61] Russia and Ukraine are both parties to the protocol; the United States and Iran signed it in 1977 and never ratified it, so for the Gulf strikes the question is one of customary law.[62]

The hard case is a building that does both. The prevailing view, as the international lawyer Michael Schmitt summarized it in 2019, is that any military use makes a civilian object a military objective, except for parts that are "clearly separate and distinct components."[63] Writing with Marko Milanovic in October, he applied that exception to buildings divided into halls: where the servers put to military use sit in a hall that can be separated from the rest, "then only the servers put to military use, and only the hall in which they are located, are military objectives."[18] The International Law Association's study group on targeting, quoted in a Just Security analysis after the March strikes, put it more starkly: once an object is used that way, "the entire object becomes a lawful target."[64] The International Committee of the Red Cross takes a narrower view. "Not every such use renders ICT infrastructure a military objective, but it may increase the likelihood of it being targeted," Wen Zhou, an ICRC legal adviser, wrote in April, urging precautions "such as separating components used for military purposes from those serving only civilian functions."[65]

The explanations on the record differ in kind. Russia's defense ministry said officially that the Ukrainian data centers it struck "process and transmit intelligence data for the Ukrainian Armed Forces."[66] For the Gulf strikes, the Revolutionary Guards pointed to Amazon's support of the US military, and Fars to the centers' role in "supporting the enemy's military and intelligence activities."[26] For the Yandex strikes Kyiv put no comparable rationale on the record; beyond Zelensky's remarks, the closest is a line in a BBC report that "Kyiv said it was targeting places that provide revenue streams for Moscow's war machine," attributed to no named official.[67] After the VK strike, Ukraine's military said VK's assets provided "information support for the Kremlin's policies, as well as for the needs of the Russian army," which Milanovic and Schmitt called "a claim about the corporation, not about the particular facility struck." Weighing the reasons each side gave, they found that Russia's, "if borne out by the facts," would "satisfy a traditional military objective analysis under IHL," though Russia "has offered no evidence whatsoever" for them. "Ukraine's justifications so far do not satisfy such an analysis, even if interpreted charitably," they wrote, adding that Ukraine "may have stronger legal arguments to justify its strikes than it has offered."[18] None of these assertions about what the targeted buildings were doing has been backed by public evidence.

Location can count under the test too. Stargate UAE's campus is at "a site near Al Dhafra Air Base," which "hosts U.S. troops," Reuters reported in September.[68] On the usual reading of Article 52, being next to a base doesn't by itself make a campus a military objective, just as Sasta's sanctions listing doesn't settle the question at Sasovo.

Workloads count as well. "A data center that is used solely or primarily for military applications is targetable," the international lawyer Ioannis Kalpouzos told The Intercept in March, "and a center that supports the Pentagon's JWCC falls in that category," referring to the Pentagon's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract.[69] We found no public record that puts US military workloads in AWS's Gulf regions; AWS's own Defense Department compliance page lists authorizations only for its US regions.[70]

Then comes proportionality: whether the expected harm to civilians would be "excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."[61] The open question is which harm counts. Schmitt argued that the analysis need not account for "the temporary disruption or loss of civilian services" that depend on the infrastructure "unless that loss placed civilians at risk of physical harm."[63] Shundai Akiyama, a major in the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, argued in September for West Point's Lieber Institute that the analysis can reach past the point of impact, since such a strike can do limited damage on site while "interrupting services used by geographically distant civilian systems." What counts, he wrote, is the resulting civilian death, injury or damage, not the lost service in itself.[71]

Opinio Juris framed the shared-tenancy problem in March: "The same data centres providing the digital infrastructure for a country's hospitals might also host its military targeting algorithms."[72]

What was hit, on both sides

When Yandex unveiled its three supercomputers in November 2021, built on Nvidia A100 chips, it said two of them, Chervonenkis and Lyapunov, were in its Sasovo data center and the third, Galushkin, was in Vladimir.[73] They are named for Russian scientists; Chervonenkis, the company says, was "one of the greatest theorists of machine learning," and all three are "dedicated specifically to machine learning tasks."[74] On October 26th Yandex said the three machines had not been damaged and had been moved out of the data centers that were hit, to new sites it did not name.[75] Refitting the sites is another matter: as of October 12th, The Moscow Times reported, a source told Kommersant that delivering replacement equipment to the damaged facilities "could take as long as six months."[9]

Russia's strikes on Ukrainian data centers began weeks before Sasovo. After strikes on September 23rd, its Ministry of Digital Transformation said "around 100,000 households in Kyiv and the region experienced internet problems."[76] Russia's defense ministry called its campaign a "mandatory digital detox."[66] On October 10th Tenet, an internet provider in Odesa, said "Significant damage was recorded" at its data center, in particular to the "cooling systems and power generation equipment."[77] On October 19th a Russian ballistic missile strike destroyed Datagroup's data center infrastructure in Kyiv, the company said. Ukraine's prime minister said Russian attacks had damaged "around 10 data centers in Kyiv in September alone."[78] "Since September, they have started taking it out systematically," Anatolii Frolenkov of the internet exchange point 1-IX told the Kyiv Independent on September 26th. "There will be outages, there will be problems."[79]

Ten addresses

The same question reaches the AI industry's own buildings. The largest entry by compute in Epoch AI's database of frontier data centers is Colossus 2 in Memphis, Tennessee: by Epoch's estimate, about 1.1 million H100-equivalents of compute and about 950 megawatts of IT power, some 7% of everything the database tracks, in one place.[80] Much of the AI industry's computing power sits in a handful of sites like it. The database tracks 96 sites with about 15.8 million H100-equivalents of compute,[80] and by our count from Epoch's data, the ten largest of them hold about 43% of that. Epoch estimates that its database covers 45% of the world's deployed AI computing capacity, with a 90% confidence range of 30% to 78%. A rough extrapolation from that puts the ten campuses at around a fifth of the world's AI compute, anywhere from about 13% to 33% on the coverage uncertainty alone.[80] Eight of the ten are in the United States, at sites run by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and the company Epoch lists as SpaceXAI; the other two are DayOne campuses in Johor, Malaysia.[80]

Companywide capital spending is still climbing. In their late-October results, Amazon said it expects about $220 billion of cash capital spending this year, Alphabet kept its range of $195 billion to $205 billion, and Meta narrowed its range to $135 billion to $145 billion: $550 billion to $570 billion across three companies, not all of it on data centers.[81][82][83] Alphabet said its spending would "increase significantly in 2027."[82]

RAND saw the possibility early. A 2024 report on securing AI model weights warned that "if specific frontier models gain strategic national security importance, one could start seeing foreign military attacks on them as well, as has already occurred with a nuclear power plant in Ukraine."[84] The protections written since are mostly aimed elsewhere. RAND's own top security level is built around stopping theft, with measures such as "supervised access for everyone."[84]

America's AI Action Plan calls for data centers "resistant to attacks by the most determined and capable nation-state actors," but only in its section on facilities for the military and intelligence community.[85] The EU's directive on the resilience of critical entities lists "providers of data centre services" as critical, but routes digital infrastructure to its cybersecurity counterpart, the NIS2 directive, instead of the chapter that sets physical measures such as "perimeter monitoring."[86] A Senate bill that would let infrastructure operators counter drones, S. 4380, covers facilities the Department of Homeland Security designates "as a high-risk site," with power plants and grid sites as the minimum; a data center would qualify only if DHS designated it.[87] Meanwhile, under a presidential order directing the Defense Department "to lease land to private developers," bases such as Fort Bliss in Texas are being lined up to host hyperscale data centers.[88]

Stargate UAE, which Iran's military has already named, is the clearest public case of an AI campus being redesigned with war in mind. Reuters reported in September that the UAE is quietly revising the 5-gigawatt Stargate UAE project into a network of sites spread across the country, with "drone and missile interceptors and electronic jamming equipment" built into the redesign, and that officials are considering putting the facilities that host the most sensitive data, "such as that used by the military, inside mountains."[68]

What to watch

Stargate UAE has its "first 200 megawatts of capacity due to come online this year,"[68] and Iran's threats now cover the whole Gulf. In Russia, private operators have until November 12th to set aside capacity the state can call on, and must hand it over within a day of a government subcommission's decision.[89] Watch, too, for how the market responds: whether any provider offers a region kept contractually separate from military workloads, in the spirit of the ICRC's advice, or one sold with war cover, and whether any insurer will write it.

Both companies' status pages ended up recommending the same minimum. AWS told Bahrain customers in April to recover from "remote backups." Yandex told its customers in October to use "any other alternative disaster recovery plans." In both cases the advice was to keep a second copy of the data outside the region that was hit.


Sources

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    Limited capacity: New resource creation is limited | Статус-панель Selectel 🦖 Selectel.Status Subscribe to updates New resource creation is limited from 14-10-26 10:53 MSK Limited capacity Cloud Platform Pools ru-1b ru-1c ru-3a ru-3b ru-3c…
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  8. Radio Svoboda (RFE/RL), Telegram (October 16, 2026), in Russian Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Новости Пожар после удара дронов повредил треть здания дата-центра «Яндекса» в Сасово Следы повреждений видны на трети здания, в котором располагается дата-центр «Яндекса» в Сасово Рязанской области, свидетельствуют…
    …▪️ На снимках за 12 октября видно повреждения крыши здания западной части здания: в этом месте крыша покрылась черным цветом.…
  9. The Moscow Times (October 12, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …что повреждения в результате удара украинских дронов в ночь на 11 октября затронули не менее пяти корпусов центра.…
    …полностью… 0:03 This media is not supported in your browser VIEW IN TELEGRAM Появились первые спутниковые снимки дата-центра "Яндекса" во Владимирской области после украинского удара На фотографии, сделанной сегодня, 16…
  10. Mediazona (October 12, 2026), in Russian Inline ↗
    4 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …“The money itself isn’t stored in the data center.…
    …That’s where the servers that power our services are located.” “We can’t yet give you a precise timeline for restoration,” Pirogov added, “but we…
    …who spoke to Kommersant, delivering replacement equipment to the damaged facilities could take as long as six months.…
    …“All your money is safe,” Dima Pirogov, CEO of Yandex’s FinTech Division, said in a statement posted to the company’s social media platforms on Sunday.…
  11. Reuters, via WTVB (October 9, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Под постом руководителя финтеха «Яндекса» Дмитрия Пирогова люди оставили больше 5200 комментариев об ипотеке, кредитках и платежах в других банках, которые нечем закрыть.…
    …«У меня сегодня платеж по ипотеке, а завтра деньги на кредитку вернуть надо, ну и кушать хочется», — писала в ответ на обращение Пирогова пользовательница Julia Noskova…
    …Яндекс лампы пойдут в мусорное ведро»; «Я ложился спать в умном доме, а проснулся в тупом».…
  12. Selectel status page, incident 405326 (opened October 14, 2026) Inline ↗
    5 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …“We have no confirmation of actual data loss, but the situation is serious: the project represents three years of work,” Savitsky said.…
    …YANDEX SHARES FALL ON RUSSIAN EXCHANGE Alexander Savitsky, who runs a start-up dating app called ⁠Pulse with 8,000 users, told Reuters that none ⁠of them had been able to access it…
    …“We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday.…
    …He confirmed on Friday that his drones had struck the Kaluga data centre in what he called “our tit-for-tat response”.…
    …Russia has struck Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.…
  13. Yandex Cloud blog, "New availability zone" (October 23, 2026), in Russian; Wayback Machine capture Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Про новую зону для переноса клиентских нагрузок 23 октября мы открываем новую зону доступности для клиентов технологической платформы.…
    …Зона располагается в новой локации, но в вашей консоли она будет отображаться со старым названием ru-central1-a .…
  14. The Moscow Times (October 29, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …“The company has faced additional external factors making it difficult to assess its financial results for the remainder of the year,” Yandex said in its third-quarter earnings report.…
    …The financial impact of the drone strikes on its data centers was not reflected in the third-quarter earnings report.…
  15. bne IntelliNews (October 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Kyiv has not claimed the attacks.…
  16. LIGA.net (October 11, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Fire Point, a defense company wrote ...that it was her FP-1 long-range drones that attacked the Yandex data center in Vladimir.…
  17. Reuters, via WTVB (October 14, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Oct 14, 2026 | 3:39 AM By Elena Fabrichnaya and Gleb Bryanski MOSCOW, Oct 14 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s biggest data centre on Wednesday, part of a series of attacks appearing to target Moscow’s ambitions to develop…
    …The strike on the Balakovo data centre, owned by Sberbank, the country’s largest bank and technology company, followed three attacks ​in the past week on data centres…
    …‌At the same time, all of Sberbank’s systems and services are operating normally and without disruption,” Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin told reporters.…
  18. Marko Milanovic and Michael Schmitt, "Data Centers as Military Objectives: The Russian and Ukrainian Justifications," Just Security (October 29, 2026) Inline ↗
    8 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …in other halls are used exclusively for civilian purposes, then only the servers put to military use, and only the hall in which they are located, are military objectives.…
    …This time, the Ukrainian military explained that VK assets provided “information support for the Kremlin’s policies, as well as for the needs of the Russian army, law enforcement agencies and military-industrial complex.” [33] However,…
    …army, law enforcement agencies and military-industrial complex.” [33] However, that is a claim about the corporation, not about the particular facility struck.…
    …If borne out by the facts, these justifications satisfy a traditional military objective analysis under IHL.…
    …By contrast, Ukraine’s justifications so far do not satisfy such an analysis, even if interpreted charitably.…
    …by attacking data centers in Russia, including those of the Russian company Yandex, [2] one under construction for Sberbank, [3] and, most recently, a VK social network data center.…
    …That said, Russia has offered no evidence whatsoever that the Ukrainian data centers were, in fact, being used as its statements allege.…
    …Ukraine may have stronger legal arguments to justify its strikes than it has offered, but so far, it is not making them.…
  19. Cybernews (October 18, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …A data center of VK (VKontakte), one of Russia's biggest technology companies, came under attack in Novosergievka.…
    …02 Ozon confirmed a fire at its Kolpino facility; VK said its services were operating normally.…
    …The company said its services were operating normally, but users have reported connection problems and outages when using VK.…
  20. Ukraine strikes town in Russia that houses a Federal Tax Service data center, Meduza, October 23, 2026 Inline ↗
    4 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Source: Meduza A data processing center belonging to Russia’s Federal Tax Service (FNS) was attacked overnight on October 23 in Gorodets, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported .…
    …Three people were injured in the attack on Gorodets.…
    …of the Internet Protection Society, told Ekho Moskvy that the Federal Tax Service operates two duplicate data centers: one in Dubna, in the Moscow region, and another in the Nizhny Novgorod region.…
    …The Gorodets District administration said “drone debris” fell in the city, halting transportation temporarily.…
  21. IODA (Georgia Tech), raw signals for AS200350 (Yandex Cloud), September 28 to November 4, 2026; Omniscient Media analysis Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …:0.0017921924591064453}],"data":[[{"entityType":"asn","entityCode":"200350","entityName":"AS200350 (YandexCloud)","entityFqid":"asn.200350","datasource":"merit-nt","subtype":"","from":1790578800,"until":1793820000,"step":…
  22. RFE/RL (October 12, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …on October 12, Zelenskyy said that after Ukraine's attacks on the data centers "it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms."…
    …online propaganda efforts and troll networks, said that the Cloudflare chart "has little to do with malicious propaganda bots on social media.…
    …It measures automated requests to websites (of any kind, among which social media share is negligible)."…
  23. Cybernews (October 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Russia-totals chart , one would see that the volume of bot traffic last week was largely the same as in any other week.…
  24. AWS Health Dashboard, public events for ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain), March 1 to September 15, 2026 Inline ↗
  25. CNBC (September 15, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility for the strikes and said it targeted the Bahrain facility for Amazon's support of the U.S. military.…
  26. CNBC (March 4, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …The attack in Bahrain was launched "to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy's military and intelligence activities," Iran's Fars News Agency said on Telegram .…
  27. CNBC (March 3, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Alaan's mobile and web apps were offline due to a "critical AWS outage caused by the ongoing regional situation," the company said on its website as of 10:38 a.m.…
    …Delivery and taxi platform Careem, payments companies Alaan and Hubpay and enterprise software provider Snowflake were all hit with service disruptions.…
    …Banking providers, including ADCB and Emirates NBD, alongside enterprise software providers like Snowflake , have also reported service…
  28. The National (March 4, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …“We sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience experienced over the past 48 hours,” said Alaa Eraiqat, chief executive of ADCB Group.…
    …ADCB did not say what caused the disruption and it was not clear whether the issues were related to a fire at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre in the UAE, which happened on the same day Iran attempted…
  29. UNIDIR, "Clouds of War: The Implications of Targeting Data Centres" (April 23, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …This marked the first documented time that such commercial data centres have been deliberately targeted as part of a military operation.…
    …Yet, this means that the digital backbone underpinning military capabilities may be distributed geographically across the territory of neutral States.…
  30. Data Center Dynamics (February 13, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …targeted in drone strikes February 13, 2026 By Sebastian Moss Have your say Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) branch struck three targets across Russian-occupied lands, including a data center.…
    Ukrainian forces strike data center in Russian-occupied Prymorsk - DCD Search Channels Recommended for you...…
  31. TechCrunch (April 6, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Iran’s military said that if the U.S. went ahead with its threats to hit its civilian infrastructure, the country would retaliate with its own strikes against the U.S.’ energy and…
    …infrastructure, the country would retaliate with its own strikes against the U.S.’ energy and tech infrastructure in the region, according to a video released late last week and shared widely on Sunday of Iranian…
    …The video released by Iran shows an image of a globe, then zooming in on the Stargate data center in the United Arab Emirates with the message of “nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google.”…
  32. Iran International (October 12, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told state-owned Press TV on Sunday night that Tehran was prepared for renewed conflict and…
    …Iranian hardliners have backed security chief Mohsen Rezaei’s threat to strike data centers, undersea internet cables and artificial intelligence facilities in the Persian Gulf if the United States and Israel resume hostilities.…
  33. The Register (October 9, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …If Yandex must write off the datacenter, it will be the second cloud provider to lose facilities to drone attacks this year after AWS decided its Bahrain facility could not be recovered after an Iranian drone…
  34. AWS Customer Agreement (last updated August 14, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …EXCEPT FOR PAYMENT OBLIGATIONS UNDER SECTION 7, NEITHER AWS NOR YOU, NOR ANY OF THEIR AFFILIATES OR LICENSORS, WILL HAVE LIABILITY TO…
    …or other elements of nature, blockages, embargoes, riots, acts or orders of government, acts of terrorism, or war.…
    …for properly configuring and using the Services and otherwise taking appropriate action to secure, protect and backup your accounts and Your Content in a manner that will provide appropriate security and protection, which might…
  35. AWS Customer Agreement, archived copy (last updated December 23, 2024), Internet Archive Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …or other elements of nature, blockages, embargoes, riots, acts or orders of government, acts of terrorism, or war.…
    …Last Updated: December 23, 2024 See What's Changed This AWS Customer Agreement (this “ Agreement ”) contains the terms and conditions that…
  36. Amazon Compute Service Level Agreement Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …EC2, or any other Amazon EC2performance issues, directly or indirectly: (i) caused by factors outside of our reasonable control, including any force majeure event or Internet access or related problems beyond the demarcation point of…
  37. Network World (March 30, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …“AWS is waiving all usage-related charges in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region for March 2026.…
  38. The Record (October 12, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …a timeline for restoring the equipment at the data centers.” On Saturday, Yandex also updated its terms of service to exclude liability for failing to meet contractual obligations because of drone strikes and other attacks,…
    …of service to exclude liability for failing to meet contractual obligations because of drone strikes and other attacks, potentially limiting customers' ability to seek compensation for disruptions.…
  39. Yandex, User Agreement (version of October 10, 2026), in Russian Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …с применением БПЛА, ракетного вооружения и иных средств поражения), любые последствия применения, воздействия, падения, запуска или срабатывания вооружений,…
  40. Yandex.Cloud, offer agreement (in force September 7, 2026), in Russian Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …стихийные бедствия; природные и промышленные катастрофы; террористические акты; военные действия; гражданские беспорядки; принятие органами государственной власти или органами местного самоуправления актов,…
    …Извещение должно содержать данные о характере обстоятельств, а также официальные документы, удостоверяющие наличие этих обстоятельств и, по возможности, дающие оценку их влияния на возможность исполнения Стороной своих…
  41. Yandex.Cloud, offer agreement (published October 11, in force October 22, 2026), in Russian Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Обстоятельства, прямо перечисленные в п. 11.2, презюмируются обстоятельствами непреодолимой силы.…
    …с применением БПЛА, ракетного вооружения и иных средств поражения), любые последствия применения, воздействия, падения, запуска или…
  42. TKS.ru, citing RBC (October 11, 2026), in Russian Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Изменения носят уточняющий характер и не меняют существующие правовые механизмы", – пояснили в компании.…
  43. Sarkis Darbinyan, opinion piece on liability for war-related damages, The Moscow Times (November 4, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …東日本リージョン1以外のリージョンについても、安全性の確認を行っています。 ■発生日時 2026年10月7日(水)午前3時40分頃 から継続中 ■影響範囲 IDCFクラウドを契約している495の企業や自治体 ※対象のお客さまには個別にご連絡をしています。 ■原因 第三者からのランサムウェア攻撃 ■現在の対応状況 ネットワークの遮断およびシステムの停止(完了)…
    …調査の結果、東日本リージョン1で障害が発生しており、第三者からのランサムウェア攻撃によるものであることが判明しました。 現在、詳細な原因の特定および影響範囲の調査を継続して進めています。なお、 東日本リージョン1以外のリージョンについても、安全性の確認を行っています。 ■発生日時 2026年10月7日(水)午前3時40分頃…
  44. IDC Frontier, incident notice (October 7, 2026), in Japanese Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …今回の障害は、IDCFクラウドを利用する企業のサービスにも影響している。 シックス・アパートでは「Movable Type クラウド版」の31台のサーバーに影響が発生し、管理画面やWebサイトが利用できない状態となっている。8日の続報では、IDCFクラウド上での復旧が見込めないことが判明したため、バックアップデータを使用し、「さくらのク…
    …シックス・アパートでは「Movable Type クラウド版」の31台のサーバーに影響が発生し、管理画面やWebサイトが利用できない状態となっている。8日の続報では、IDCFクラウド上での復旧が見込めないことが判明したため、バックアップデータを使用し、「さくらのクラウド」への移行と復旧を順次進めていると発表した。…
    …サーバーに影響が発生し、管理画面やWebサイトが利用できない状態となっている。8日の続報では、IDCFクラウド上での復旧が見込めないことが判明したため、バックアップデータを使用し、「さくらのクラウド」への移行と復旧を順次進めていると発表した。 グリニッジが提供する「らくらく在庫」「らくらく最安更新」「ウルトラASP」の一部でもサービスが停止。在庫連携や価格更新などの処理ができない状態となっている。…
  45. Impress Watch (October 8, 2026), in Japanese Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …攻撃を受けた東日本リージョン1の一部の仮想サーバーを利用していた495の企業や自治体のお客さまには個別にご連絡し、代替環境への移行やバックアップデータの取り出しなど、一日も早くお客さまのシステムを復旧するために、ソフトバンク株式会社と連携して、全社を挙げて支援に取り組んでいます。…
    …外部のセキュリティ専門企業と連携して詳細な調査を進めた結果、お客さまが仮想サーバーの起動や請求情報の確認などに利用する「IDCFクラウドポータル」の認証システムで使用していたオープンソースソフトウェアの脆弱性を突かれて、第三者が認証システムに侵入していたことが判明しました。その後、ランサムウェア攻撃により、一部のお客さまの仮想サーバーが停止するとともに暗号化されましたが、調査の結果、お客さまの仮想サーバー内のデータの外部への流出はあ…
    …性を突かれて、第三者が認証システムに侵入していたことが判明しました。その後、ランサムウェア攻撃により、一部のお客さまの仮想サーバーが停止するとともに暗号化されましたが、調査の結果、お客さまの仮想サーバー内のデータの外部への流出はありませんでした。現在、攻撃を受けた東日本リージョン1の一部以外の仮想サーバーは稼働中ですが、脆弱性があった「IDCFクラウドポータル」は外部から遮断して利用を停止しており、安全性を十分に確認した上で再開する予定です。…
  46. IDC Frontier, seventh incident report (October 27, 2026), in Japanese Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Other Operating Expense (Income), Net Other operating expense (income), net was $308 million and $447 million for Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, and was primarily related to charges associated with damaged data centers in the Middle East…
    …million for Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, and was primarily related to charges associated with damaged data centers in the Middle East in Q1 2026, asset impairments, and the amortization of intangible assets.…
  47. Amazon.com, Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 (filed April 30, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Other Operating Expense (Income), Net Other operating expense (income), net was $199 million and $90 million for Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, and $507 million and $537 million for the six months ended June 30, 2025 and 2026, and was…
    …million and $537 million for the six months ended June 30, 2025 and 2026, and was primarily related to asset impairments and the amortization of intangible assets.…
  48. Amazon.com, Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (filed July 30, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Other Operating Expense (Income), Net Other operating expense (income), net was $2.9 billion and $134 million for Q3 2025 and Q3 2026, and $3.4 billion and $671 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2025 and 2026, and…
    …of a lawsuit for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2025, was primarily related to asset impairments and the amortization of intangible assets.…
  49. Amazon.com, Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 (filed October 29, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …expenditures, and physical damage to data centers or key energy infrastructure from natural disasters, geopolitical events, terrorist events or other catastrophic events could adversely affect our profitability.…
  50. Oracle Corporation, Form 10-K for fiscal 2026 (filed June 22, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Our insurance policies contain industry standard exclusions for events such as war and nuclear reaction.…
  51. Equinix, Inc., Form 10-K for 2025 (filed February 11, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …We do not carry insurance for generally uninsured exposures such as loss from war or nuclear reaction.…
  52. Digital Realty Trust, Inc., Form 10-K for 2025 (filed February 13, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Before the war, data-center developers could purchase up to $3 billion of coverage for a single property, he said; “Today the max we could probably do is $100 million.” Iranian…
    …developers could purchase up to $3 billion of coverage for a single property, he said; “Today the max we could probably do is $100 million.” Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates in…
    …have cost $250,000 per year before the outbreak of hostilities costs $5 million today, said Joe Peiser, CEO of Risk Capital at Aon, the giant insurance brokerage.…
  53. Semafor (April 1, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …The exclusion of damages caused by hostile or warlike action by a government or sovereign power in times of war or peace requires the involvement of military action.…
  54. Merck & Co. v. Ace American Insurance Co., New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division (May 1, 2023) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Supernova+ The strike hit the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant.…
    …Ryazan region authorities did not name the plant, saying only that the roof of “one of the enterprises” caught fire after the Ukrainian attack.…
    …The plant is on the sanctions lists of several Western countries.…
  55. dev.ua (February 14, 2025) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.…
    …destruction, cap- ture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.…
    …civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.…
  56. Ukrainska Pravda (October 4, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June…
  57. Ars Technica (October 5, 2026) Inline ↗
    4 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …The prevailing position among IHL experts is that any military use of a civilian object, including cyber infrastructure, renders the object a military objective, with the exception of those aspects…
    …the object a military objective, with the exception of those aspects thereof that are clearly separate and distinct components.78 The report expresses apprehension about this standard should it be applied in the cyber context.…
    …on dual-use cyber infrastructure would not need, as a matter of law, to account for the temporary disruption or loss of civilian services that depend on it unless that loss placed civilians at risk of physical harm or civilian…
    …to account for the temporary disruption or loss of civilian services that depend on it unless that loss placed civilians at risk of physical harm or civilian objects at risk of damage.…
  58. The Moscow Times (October 12, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …And as noted in the International Law Association’s study group report on targeting, the effective contribution requirement “requires a proximate nexus…
    …once an object is used in such a way as to fulfill the definition of military objective, the entire object becomes a lawful target” (page 336).…
  59. Reuters, via WTVB (November 2, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Not every such use renders ICT infrastructure a military objective, but it may increase the likelihood of it being targeted, exposing civilians who rely on it to incidental harm.…
    …objective, and implementing all feasible precautionary measures, such as separating components used for military purposes from those serving only civilian functions.…
  60. Meduza (October 8, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …26, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it was striking data centers because they “process and transmit intelligence data for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” The next day, the ministry posted an image of a drone on social media with the…
    Russia keeps attacking Ukrainian data centers, calling it a ‘mandatory digital detox’ — Meduza Skip to main content Home Newsletter About Shop RU news Russia keeps attacking Ukrainian data centers, calling it a ‘mandatory digital detox’…
  61. ICRC, Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 (Protocol I, Articles 51, 52 and 57) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Kyiv said it was targeting places that provide revenue streams for Moscow's war machine, and that the attacks could force Russia to divert its resources to repair…
  62. ICRC IHL Databases, Additional Protocol I, record of states parties and signatories (data feed) Inline ↗
    6 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …hidden from our sight.” Two people familiar with the matter confirmed the location at a site near Al Dhafra Air Base, which was not publicly known.…
    …The base on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi hosts U.S. troops and has been targeted during the war, which began in February.…
    …Ayyub and Timour Azhari Sept 11 (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates is quietly revising plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data center project – one of the biggest outside the U.S. – after the Iran war prompted a rethink of how and where…
    …Air defense systems are being incorporated into the redesign, including drone and missile interceptors and electronic jamming equipment, three sources said.…
    …officials are considering putting facilities that host the most sensitive data, such as that used by the military, inside mountains, the two said.…
    …a $30-billion, 1-gigawatt compute cluster known as Stargate UAE, began last year with the first 200 megawatts of capacity due to come online this year.…
  63. Michael N. Schmitt, "Wired warfare 3.0: Protecting the civilian population during cyber operations," International Review of the Red Cross (2019), accepted manuscript Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …“A data center that is used solely or primarily for military applications is targetable,” said Ioannis Kalpouzos, an international law scholar and visiting…
    …Kalpouzos, an international law scholar and visiting professor at Harvard Law, “and a center that supports the Pentagon’s JWCC falls in that category.” Related AI’s Imperial Agenda The march of data center construction has become a…
  64. Just Security (March 12, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …and approved as a cloud service provider for the US East and US West Regions at Impact Level 2, AWS GovCloud (US) at Impact Levels 4 and 5, and the AWS Secret Region at Impact Level 6.…
  65. ICRC Humanitarian Law & Policy blog, Wen Zhou (April 23, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …*** Shundai Akiyama is a Major in the Japan Air Self-Defense Force.…
    …A strike may cause limited destruction at the point of impact while interrupting services used by geographically distant civilian systems.…
    …Attacks against commercial data centers therefore present a challenge of legal application rather than legal innovation.…
  66. Meduza (September 28, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …this integration has created a dual-use trap when the same data centres providing the digital infrastructure for a country’s hospitals might also host its military targeting algorithms, making the distinction between civilian…
  67. BBC News (October 11, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …системы * Облачные вычисления * Суперкомпьютеры Суперкомпьютер «Червоненкис» в дата-центре Яндекса в Сасове, Рязанская область.…
    …Суперкомпьютер «Галушкин» размещен в дата-центре компании во Владимире .…
    …Суперкомпьютеры «Яндекса» построены на базе процессоров AMD EPYC и графических ускорителей NVIDIA A100 с интерконнектом InfiniBand на базе коммутаторов Mellanox.…
  68. Reuters, via Internazionale (September 11, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …The three Yandex supercomputers are dedicated specifically to machine learning tasks.…
    …Chervonenkis Named after Alexey Chervonenkis, one of the greatest theorists of machine learning.…
  69. The Intercept (March 20, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …«НОВАЯ ГАЗЕТА» Суперкомпьютеры «Яндекса» при ударах дронов по центрам обработки данных повреждений не получили, сообщила пресс-служба компании.…
    …Их вывезли из попавших под удар дата-центров и сейчас разворачивают на новых вычислительных площадках.…
  70. AWS, Department of Defense compliance page Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation said around 100,000 households in Kyiv and the region experienced internet problems after the attack, with repair crews assessing damage and working to restore…
  71. Shundai Akiyama, Articles of War, Lieber Institute, West Point (September 10, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …armed forces October 12, 2026 By Dan Swinhoe Have your say Russian military strikes hit a data center in the Odesa area of Ukraine operated by local Internet service provider Tenet.…
    …“Significant damage was recorded to the facility's life support systems, in particular the cooling systems and power generation equipment.” Tenet lists its location as 106 Bazarna Street in central Odesa.…
  72. Opinio Juris (March 12, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …On October 19, a Russian ballistic missile strike destroyed Datagroup's data center infrastructure in Kyiv, according to the company.…
    …Діана Подзігун Редакторка стрічки новин 23 October 2026 18:05 Russian attacks damaged around 10 data centers in Kyiv in September alone, Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi said on October 23, warning that Moscow is…
  73. Habr (November 16, 2021), in Russian Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …"This is the beginning of a phase where, since September, they have started taking it out systematically," Anatolii Frolenkov, a representative of the 1-IX internet exchange point, told the…
    …"There will be outages, there will be problems.…
  74. Yandex, "Supercomputers" Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …«The first Law „On Cloud Services“ was adopted a week before the start of a full-scale war.…
    …It allowed for the transfer of registries abroad and the storage of data in the clouds.…
    …Read in Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov reported that the government has adopted a resolution developed by the Ministry of Digital Affairs, which…
  75. Novaya Gazeta (October 26, 2026), in Russian Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Advertisement The government has allocated UAH 518.3 million (about US$11.5 million) to establish backup environments at separate locations, cloud infrastructure, and additional sites…
    …UAH 518.3 million (about US$11.5 million) to establish backup environments at separate locations, cloud infrastructure, and additional sites for state information systems.…
  76. The Record (September 24, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …in building more underground telecommunication networks to boost resiliency, said Kateryna Chernohorenko, Ukraine’s former deputy minister of defense for digital transformation, in an interview with Breaking…
    …telecommunication networks to boost resiliency, said Kateryna Chernohorenko, Ukraine’s former deputy minister of defense for digital transformation, in an interview with Breaking Defense .…
    …But she also cautioned that “you cannot move everything underground” and emphasized the need for allies to help boost Ukraine’s air defenses against Russia’s ballistic…
  77. Data Center Dynamics (October 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …The Digital Development Ministry, together with the Defense Ministry, is working on the issue of protecting these facilities,” Shadayev told a State Duma committee, according to Interfax.…
  78. Hromadske (October 23, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …| 10:39 AM Nov 2 (Reuters) – Russian owners of non-state data centres will be required to reserve 10% ​of their capacity to ‌help keep Russia’s IT infrastructure running, according to a decree signed by President Vladimir…
    …The decree also allows for ​the ⁠temporary use of data centres located abroad, subject to approval by the FSB security service.…
  79. The Kyiv Independent (September 26, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …96 sites 15.8M H100-equivalents 15.1 GW IT power 45% coverage Download this data Compute IT Power Cost Graph Table Show more Customize graph…
    …AI compute reported in the chip sales database , we estimate this database’s coverage of global deployed AI computing capacity to be 45% as of November 6, 2026 (90% CI: 30% to 78%).…
  80. Epoch AI, Frontier Data Centers database (retrieved November 4, 2026); Omniscient Media analysis of its data_centers.csv Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …• We continue to expect 2026 cash capital expenditures to be approximately $220 billion.…
  81. Amazon.com, Inc., third-quarter 2026 results, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1 (October 29, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Our full year 2026 CapEx guidance range of $195 billion to $205 billion remain unchanged.…
    …We continue to expect our CapEx to increase significantly in 2027, and we'll provide further details on our Q4 call.…
  82. Alphabet third-quarter 2026 earnings call, transcript via The Motley Fool (October 28, 2026) Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $135-145 billion, narrowed from our prior outlook of $130-145 billion.…
  83. Meta Platforms, Inc., third-quarter 2026 results, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1 (October 21, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …models gain strategic national security importance, one could start seeing foreign military attacks on them as well, as has already occurred with a nuclear power plant in Ukraine.178 Supply Chain Attacks Supply chain attacks involve…
    …key components Physical Security • Increased significant guarding (compared with SL4) • Supervised access for everyone • Routine rigorous device inspections • Disabling of most communication at the hardware level Permitted…
  84. RAND, "Securing AI Model Weights" (RR-A2849-1, 2024) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …The data centers where these models are deployed must be resistant to attacks by the most determined and capable nation-state actors.…
    …16 Build High-Security Data Centers for Military and Intelligence Community Usage ..............…
  85. The White House, America's AI Action Plan (July 2025) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …computing services as defined in Article 6, point (30), of Directive (EU) 2022/2555 — Providers of data centre services as defined in Article 6, point (31), of Directive (EU) 2022/2555 — Providers of content delivery…
    …States shall ensure that Article 11 and Chapters III, IV and VI do not apply to critical entities that they have identified in the sectors set out in points 3, 4 and 8 of the table in the Annex.…
    …premises and critical infrastructure, duly considering, for example, fencing, barriers, perimeter monitoring tools and routines, detection equipment and access controls; (c) respond to, resist and mitigate the…
  86. Directive (EU) 2022/2557 on the resilience of critical entities, Article 8, Article 13 and Annex Inline ↗
    1 passage checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, as a high-risk site, including, at a minimum, nuclear generating stations, key substations, transformer stations, and control centers of the bulk power system.''; (D) in…
  87. S. 4380, 119th Congress, as introduced (April 22, 2026) Inline ↗
    2 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …A year ago, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Defense to lease land to private developers for this purpose.…
    …Reporter Bio Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Bluesky Email Comments Fort Bliss, in Texas, could soon be the site of a hyperscale data center developed by the Carlyle Group.…
  88. Mother Jones (July 25, 2026) Inline ↗
    3 passages checked · read November 6, 2026
    …Сделать это необходимо до 12 ноября.…
    …Предоставлять мощности будет необходимо в течение суток после принятия такого решения.…
    …Кроме того, источник «Ъ» усомнился, что правительственная подкомиссия будет устанавливать цены на аренду мощностей на уровне рынка.…
  89. Владельцев ЦОДов обязали зарезервировать 10% мощностей (Data-center owners required to reserve 10% of capacity), Habr, citing Kommersant, November 3, 2026 Inline ↗
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