Ukrainian drones knock out AI data center owned by "Russia's Google"
A Ukrainian drone attack has knocked out an artificial intelligence data center belonging to a company dubbed "Russia's Google". Reuters reports that other Russian services were also disrupted, including a dating app and a real estate aggregator.
Ukrainian drones have knocked out an artificial intelligence data center owned by a company described as "Russia's Google". It is the latest example of data centers becoming targets in wartime in 2026. A data center is a facility housing the servers that keep online services running.
According to Reuters, the outage reached beyond the company itself. Other affected Russian services included a dating app, a real estate aggregator, a self-publishing book platform and the website of the most successful professional soccer club in the Russian Premier League.
Data centers as wartime targets
Data centers have been hit elsewhere this year. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, Iranian drones knocked out several Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has regularly carried out mass missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities. Targets have included the power grid, transport hubs and residential apartment buildings. Ukraine has recently faced a shortage of interceptor weapons able to shoot down Russian missiles and jet-powered drones. In response to the attacks, the Ukrainian military has gradually expanded its own medium- and long-range drone strike campaign.
Ukraine's drone strikes have so far concentrated on Russian military bases and supply lines, Russian-linked shipping in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, and energy infrastructure such as oil refineries. In summer 2026, Ukraine also hit several warehouses belonging to the Russian companies Wildberries and Ozon, which are described as Russia's equivalents of Amazon.
Signs of a widening war
Separately, coordinated aerial and sea drone attacks sank two commercial ships in the Black Sea on October 5 and 6, inside the exclusive economic zones of NATO members Romania and Bulgaria. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blamed Russia for those attacks.
