Except that nuclear reactors are very robustly built, unlike data centers. Nuclear stations are designed to withstand against the airplane dropping in.
Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.
From reddit - "Right now, Yandex's biggest services are down: taxis, delivery, and Alisa. Moscow is paralyzed; it's impossible to order a taxi. Orders aren't going through."
Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
In Vietnam, the USSR gave a considerable amount of equipment to Vietnam, they stationed 3,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and over a dozen of them were killed. The USSR told Vietnam where B-52s were heading so they could evacuate military leaders and get other military units out of the way. Soviet crews were firing SAMs at F-4 Phantoms and shooting them down, and Soviet pilots were flying planes.
When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not have the domestic capability to build Stinger missiles themselves...
You also set up Hormuz and tariffs and spread discord between EU citiz ns through speeches of high officials and threaten Greenland, causing us to prepare to defend on multiple fronts while often publicly supporting Russia too.
They're just using USA as political cover, which is how it has always been been. USA warned Europe for decades not to become reliant on cheap Russian gas because it would be weaponized against them. The Biden administration even sanctioned German companies [1] building Nordstream 2 because it was a Russian geopolitical project.
The Yandex of today isn't exactly the Yandex of 2020. The people who were at the helm back then whitewashed their reputations, renamed to Nebius, and are now supplying compute to Palantir.
The Internet is almost 100% packet switching, a technique that someone brilliant in ARPA came up with the idea of claiming it was intended for nuclear warfare survival, in order to ensure funding.
“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.
It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
This was the result of what unfolded after regional electricity prices spiked (550%) after a corporation decided to take a lot of local power for itself.
After local opposition began forming, Shiawase Corporation made a false flag attack against itself to influence a future ruling where it could then defend itself similar to a sovereign nation in a foreign land. So full corporate “extraterritoriality”, to where maintaining its own regulated militia/defense force would be legally free and clear.
In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
Ukraine showed you can deploy from shipping containers delivered inside hostile lands quite successfully. As much stuff gets smuggled into US ports on a daily basis, sneaking a few of these into the US isn't impossible. Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
The genie is out of the bottle, over the next 100 years this is a real problem US, China, and Europe will face.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
It's already happened to Amazon once, and they were not able to recover the data from the destroyed data centre, so they have already experienced this and have some data on which to make those decisions.
If you are referring to the recent UAE datacenter attacks, AFAIK Amazon's services worked as advertised, but obviously a redundant resource is only as good as the number of copies you have left, and eventually 3 of 3 datacenters were hit.
Apparently not all AWS resources/services are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. in a different region) or not.
This is one of the factors driving the development of orbital satellite data centers. While satellites are also vulnerable, they are at least somewhat harder to hit than a stationary terrestrial data center. For now it's questionable whether such constellations are feasible due to concerns over launch costs and cooling but some people are taking it seriously.
In addition to all the engineering problems associated with cooling those data centers and the shields that you'd need against cosmic rays, those things would only accelerate Kessler syndrome.
The difference is that to hit stationary terrestrial data center in the USA you'd need to go through multiple layers of defense systems, not to mention it would probably be an act of war.
As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.
Nah. There's no practical way to jam tight beam satellite data links unless you place the jammer near the ground terminal. And the US government has already stated that they would consider kinetic strikes on US-owned commercial satellites as an act of war.
How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single MOAB? Is it an impossible number to reach for those unable to deliver MOAB?
We're talking about bunker-busters - the MOAB is not a bunker buster. It's an airburst weapon designed to clear out large open spaces, and isn't effective against hardened bunkers.
No reasonable amount of quadcopters could match a bunker-buster. Surface explosions are not very effective against buried targets.
The weight and density of the bunker-buster is extremely important to its operation. When dropped from a high altitude, it breaks into the bunker with sheer kinetic force, and then explodes once inside.
Yeah, I'm not a military expert and confused the ordinance nick names. To be sure, the kinetic force is definitely something that cannot be recreated with drone swarm attacks.
Those are entirely different missions. A GBU-43 MOAB is used against soft targets on the ground. A GBU-28 is used against hardened buried targets. It's simply physically impossible to dig a big enough hole with a bunch of small drones or bombs: the only way to penetrate deeply enough is with a hard object moving really fast.
A MOAB apparently has the equivalent of 11tons of TNT. A drone carrying a grenade has up to 180 grams. So you need about 61 111 drones to deliver the equivalent explosive. At that point it might be cheaper to just bring the MOAB.
61111 * $200 is only a little over $12million. The plane to deliver the MOAB is more than that. Also, why does it need to be a grenade? Why not deliver C4 or other explosive material?
>How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single <orders of magnitude larger purpose designed munition>?
How long do I have to piss on a steel plate to get the same effect as a waterjet cutter?
You don't dig a hole deep enough that Bunker Busters can't penetrate. You drive up to the root of a mountain where it meets flats and drill sideways. Getting your men out in case the entrance was bombed can be tricky though.
The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/drone gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
You could do a ghaza and park human shields over military relevant infrastructure? Introducing Host.Age housing the only housing with free heating, free warn water and free leftover tokens .
Releasing drone swarms wrapping in chaff with IR lamps or laser diodes to account for different guidance methods. They cluster around predicted trajectory. Could be more cost effective than a Patriot battery
They don't all have to be drones in the conventional sense. A subset could be a set of balloons with different amounts of helium, an arduino/servos that control one or more fans for directional and limited altitude control, and a box/release with chaff inside.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
I look forward to anthropic drone swarms defending against AWS mounted infantry and OpenAI cruise drones. SpaceX is at war with Pepsi. SpaceX had always been at war with Pepsi.
No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).
Russian suicide drones are still like minimum $10k each. That's probably like ~1k rounds in 12.7mm/14.5mm or ~200 rounds in 20mm. Missiles are a lot more expensive, but the defense side cost can be substantially lower than the offense side if you could make it work with an auto turret rather than guided missiles.
Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.
The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
A lot of the smaller drones that Ukraine is using only do limited damage - they may start a fire that can spread, but are not going to destroy an entire larger facility (although the Flamingo can do significant damage). Many Russian energy facilities just get hit repeatedly over time - Russia will fix as fast as they can. Staggering hits seems to make sense.
Energy facilities have the destructive energy stockpiled on-site. Don't need to fly in much force yourself.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.
I think the energy facilities being hit are mostly refineries - not storage, and anyways any bulk storage is just temporary for bulk transport for export or to the front, etc, so having it in 25gal cans wouldn't be very helpful!
There are chemical based emp bombs, NNEMPs, if the penetrate through to the inside and set that off it seems like it would be pretty effective on datacenters.
Russian air defense is multi layered and relatively strong, so one of Ukraine's main strategies so far has been just to overwhelm them with volume. You want mass volume cheap and cheerful, not expensive ones, unless for the occasional strategic target.
Ukraine only has limited number of more capable missiles/drones like Flamingo FP-5 and Neptune, although now the FP-7 is about to hit volume production, followed by the FP-9, as well as Europe-supplied missile and anti-missile systems, so it remains to be seen if this will change Ukraine's strategy ... I tend to doubt it - they will have firepower to retaliate much harder, and at further distance, when they want to, but I expect they don't want to unilaterally escalate.
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.
They just re-host it on chinese clouds. Most of european part of russia dont have mobile internet for years now and it did not change much for people living there.
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
> So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.
That's true, however they don't use this capability like it's infinite. They only utilize this when Russia does something similar or plans of doing something similar leaks.
I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.
I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.
Exactly, long-range drone attack capability is an asymmetric advantage for Ukraine only relative to their other capabilities, not relative to Russia. Russia can easily make Kyiv unlivable, as they are just starting to do.
I seem to recall that this is optimal game theoretic strategy - don't initiate, but always immediately retaliate.
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
Apparently Wildberries carried over 1/4 million items tagged as "for SMO" (Special Military Operation), so they had become a major part of the supply chain for Putin's war, which is why they were hit.
I don't know what sites you frequent but strikes on distribution centers by both sides has been covered by mainstream US news.
Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?
Will it be possible? Yes. Will it be easy, or cheap? No.
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
I use ARM VPSes for quite some time and they are pretty performant. They don't have to replace with x86 systems. Linux on ARM is pretty mature and production ready at this point.
I don't know the hardware inside the data center, and it might not be a "AI" data center to begin with. NAND is a big problem, but DDR4 memory is not AFAICS, and if you need CPU power for serving stuff, getting it is easy.
If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!
my Arm/Android set-top box of choice for, ahem, streaming subscriptions, is up 50% in price despite no changes to the design since I bought it 2 years ago. And that's on aliexpress where margins are limited.
Problem is that RAM and disk manufacturing capacity is all sold out years ahead. Yandex while being largest IT company in Russia have nowhere near the money to compete with AI hyperscalers.
Nebius which is basically was out-of-Russia part Yandex is now larger than what left of Yandex in Russia.
great question, I don't have a good answer. supposedly there are modern gpus in Russia, here you can rent a H200 (a GPU which was released after the war had started)
https://selectel.ru/services/dedicated/hgx-h200/
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
The only ones I know are the older timers with rosy soviet glasses. Young people, the ones who would do the actual fighting, seem to have incredibly low support for it.
Russians won't storm anything, but if you observe their actual behavior, it's easy to see that they don't attribute their problems to Ukraine. No one is volunteering to go fight there without very high signup bonuses and salaries.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Seems like the majority of people are uneducated to this extreme degree. Including the very highest leaders of the EU and the USA.
You know, things like coups exist. In many, many other countries leadership as bad as Russia's would have been ousted in a military coup long time ago, and the new regime would have pursued saner policy.
What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.
I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.
That has been said for four years. Due to russians using mobile incinerators to conceal causulties (and war crimes), not even caskets arrives home. Most russians know this, but what does it help.
The problem is Russians are too afraid to turn on their motherland because "reasons" but that is exactly what has to happen to end the war. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it.
Americans are so naive about the "turn on their motherland" part. It's not really a reply to you, I just remembered some american whom I met and he was treating us as kids, saying things as "alone you are weak but together you are strong!"
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people?
You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
When Navalny came back, over 300 000 people came out to protest, despite being terrorized. That did nothing. It's not like those people had guns and were ready to use them. And even if they did, that would only be an additional argument to use extra power of Putin's police state. Heck, if people did that, the very same "European anti-Putinists" would heavily condemn the violence and would support the crackdown on the "violent protestors" ("The future of the country is in stability and communication, not in violence. We urge people to lower their weapons. We support President Putin's attempts to keep the country stable and do what is necessary. We will send him an additional supply of tear gas and protest dispersal equipment. EU and Russia must stand together in these trying times.").
"The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."
There are two points to answer this question.
First is that the majority of russian population supports the war, and the number of russians that are anti-war now but can become supporters of an aggression as results of these strikes is negligible.
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
They could take accountability and face the consequences of resigning for their country responsibilities.
Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.
How come no more "Buchas" happened in the war? How come the only "Bucha" happened after Russia withdrew in anticipation of a peace agreement that was heavily opposed by UK and others?
After Nord Stream, we all know what those maniacs are capable of.
Tragically a lot Buchas happened[0], and there's plenty of videos of civilian executions - God only knows what atrocities are yet to be discovered in occupied territories.
All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.
You should also look at the evidence for executions of "collaborators" after Ukraine recaptured e.g. Kherson, Kupyansk, Izyum (and, in fact, Bucha, although there is also plenty of evidence of Russian war crimes there).
Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s shipping containers or even privately owned houses, filled with optically controlled or autonomous drones, sitting near high value infrastructure around the world. Mirroring those Ukrainian trucks.
It's fine. Putin doesn't even know how to use computers, let alone Internet. So all this is not bothering him at all. And he is the only person who can decide to stop the war; nobody else has that ability.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/drone-and-data-ce...
we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure
Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1x1q...
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-helps-u...
When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not have the domestic capability to build Stinger missiles themselves...
Translated, we give them the missiles, we give them the intelligence, we give them the target, we set it up… we let them push the red button.
Are you sure the missiles are support?
They're just using USA as political cover, which is how it has always been been. USA warned Europe for decades not to become reliant on cheap Russian gas because it would be weaponized against them. The Biden administration even sanctioned German companies [1] building Nordstream 2 because it was a Russian geopolitical project.
We see how it all turned out.
[1] https://2021-2025.state.gov/nord-stream-2-and-potential-sanc...
It's too bad Eastern Germany never managed to deruzzify itself properly after DDR fell.
April 27, 2020:
"Yandex highlighted negative articles about Navalny in its search results; the company called it an "experiment."
https://zona-media.translate.goog/news/2020/04/27/navyandex?...
“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.
It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
We felt a lot of it was… unnervingly believable in multiple aspects. As in, what parent mentioned.
I do not look forward to the “Seretech Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Seretech_Decision), “Shiawase Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Shiawase_Decision) or similar sorts of judicial rulings in the real world. True nightmare fuel.
——-
Somewhat… prescient, is the Shiawase Decision.
This was the result of what unfolded after regional electricity prices spiked (550%) after a corporation decided to take a lot of local power for itself.
After local opposition began forming, Shiawase Corporation made a false flag attack against itself to influence a future ruling where it could then defend itself similar to a sovereign nation in a foreign land. So full corporate “extraterritoriality”, to where maintaining its own regulated militia/defense force would be legally free and clear.
Not just for datacenters either - warehouses, refineries, power stations, you could sell to anybody with a building full of expensive stuff.
Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
This would be incredibly stupid. An attack on American soil could be met with a literally nuclear response against Iran or whoever perpetrated it.
(We did nominally succeed in regime change in the country that didn't attack us, though...)
It wasn't Afghanistan (as a nation) that directly carried out 9/11. The government did have close ties with Al Qaeda and sheltered it though.
Prediction markets are betting on a false flag attack around midterms.
So...the west if we go by the recent statements of chancellor Merz
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
Apparently not all AWS resources/services are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. in a different region) or not.
https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind
As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.
I feel like China and US are the only ones in the next 50 years who'll have launch capability cheap enough to hit satellites.
I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.
It did not help the Iranians and their nuclear facilities.
No reasonable amount of quadcopters could match a bunker-buster. Surface explosions are not very effective against buried targets.
The weight and density of the bunker-buster is extremely important to its operation. When dropped from a high altitude, it breaks into the bunker with sheer kinetic force, and then explodes once inside.
How long do I have to piss on a steel plate to get the same effect as a waterjet cutter?
About the same answer.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/28/russia-lets-privat...
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).
https://missilethreat.csis.org/countermeasures-penetration-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
Obelisks from Command and Conquer pinned to the roof of the DC would be amusing although personally I'm leaning towards prism towers.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.
Ukraine only has limited number of more capable missiles/drones like Flamingo FP-5 and Neptune, although now the FP-7 is about to hit volume production, followed by the FP-9, as well as Europe-supplied missile and anti-missile systems, so it remains to be seen if this will change Ukraine's strategy ... I tend to doubt it - they will have firepower to retaliate much harder, and at further distance, when they want to, but I expect they don't want to unilaterally escalate.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
Russia isn't a Western Democracy.
It's a totally different situation - they're at war.
I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.
I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
I haven't seen any site I frequent mention this once. The PR bubble is very real.
Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!
Nebius which is basically was out-of-Russia part Yandex is now larger than what left of Yandex in Russia.
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
Here's a better source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
(looks like they changed "center" to "centre")
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
It seems to have somehow escaped your notice that Russia has been storming Ukraine for almost 5 years.
There is a (massive) difference between soldiers there to get a paycheck, and soldiers there to avenge their communities.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Seems like the majority of people are uneducated to this extreme degree. Including the very highest leaders of the EU and the USA.
What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.
I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.
As opposed to right now where they are the best of friends?
So my fear is that Ukraine attacking Russian societal pillars will begin to manifest animosity.
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people? You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
"The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."
In which ways does the situation where "most Russians turn on Ukraine" differ from the current reality?
https://wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/spe...
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.
After Nord Stream, we all know what those maniacs are capable of.
Or you're going to okay the card that every organization is in cahoots in the big American conspiracy to control the world?
Could it be that it's maybe you the victim of propaganda?
All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...
https://united24media.com/world/yandex-hides-all-four-cloud-...
It's probably one of the safest places on the planet.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_shrubland
>Scottish independence accounts go dark after Iran internet blackout
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