BBC: Son of a Russian FSB General Helps Run Company Selling Mobile Data Centers Amid Ukrainian Drone Strikes
Demand for mobile data centers in Russia is rising after Ukrainian strikes on data centers of the tech company Yandex. The BBC Russian Service reports that one supplier is linked to the son of a senior general in Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).
Russian businesses had been preparing for threats to data centers long before Ukraine began attacking them, the BBC Russian Service reports. Following Ukrainian strikes on data centers of Yandex, a major Russian internet company, demand has grown for mobile, container-based data centers. One supplier is linked to the son of Sergey Korolev, First Deputy Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Strikes on Yandex data centers
From October 8 to 11, Ukraine attacked three of Yandex's six data centers: in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, in Kaluga and in Vladimir. The strikes disrupted both Yandex's own services and those of other companies. The affected sites housed all three of Yandex's supercomputers: Chervonenkis, Lyapunov and Galushkin. As of the evening of October 11, the extent of the damage was unknown. According to the newspaper Kommersant, replacing damaged equipment could take about six months.
BBC sources say people in the industry had considered such attacks inevitable since late summer. Two-thirds of Russia's data centers are concentrated in the Moscow region and St. Petersburg. On October 6, Deputy Digital Development Minister Yevgeny Filatov urged companies to move computing capacity "somewhere beyond the Urals," where the strikes have not yet reached.
Demand for mobile data centers
Demand has risen since late summer. Buyers include IT companies, mobile operators, and medium-sized and large businesses. Suppliers include Rostelecom subsidiary RTK-TsOD and Yadro, part of X Holding. Boris Korolev, the FSB official's son, is a deputy CEO of the holding. He took the post in 2023, at age 27, when Garda, a company in which he held a 20% stake, acquired a stake in the holding after the death of its founder, Anton Cherepennikov. Whether he kept the stake is unknown, as financial reports are not public.
In 2026 Yadro launched Borey, a containerized data center. According to government procurement records, one unit costs 18 million to 25 million rubles without servers, and with computing equipment the price can reach hundreds of millions of rubles.
X Holding also supplies equipment for TSPU internet traffic filtering systems. The new draft budget would allocate 60 billion rubles for blocking and filtering over the next three years, twice the amount previously planned.
