Yandex loses its 50MW Vladimir data centre to the third drone strike in four days

Fifty megawatts over up to 2,880 racks is about 17 kW per rack position ^[10][15]. Yandex took all of it offline at once when it shut the Vladimir site ^[1]. The timing made the loss harder to absorb. Sasovo had been completely shut down after an attack on October 8, and Kaluga partly disabled on October 9 ^[5][6], so of the three sites hit, two went fully dark and one partly ^[14]. A cloud operator moving work off a failed site needs its other sites intact, and by October 11 two of Yandex's were already damaged ^[14][1]. The reports do not include Yandex's total number of data centres, so the share of its capacity now offline cannot be worked out from them.

Yandex shares fell nearly 4% on the Moscow Exchange after the second strike, cryptobriefing reported ^[12]. That puts the move after Kaluga and before Vladimir closed ^[6][1]. Cryptobriefing wrote that the decline "suggests investors are pricing in geopolitical risk that was previously easier to treat as background noise" ^[13].

We think the operational half of that claim is well supported and the pricing half is thin. The damage is counted in two full shutdowns, one partial one and more than 80 disrupted services ^[14][3]. The price evidence is one move of nearly 4%, reported by one publisher, taken before the 50MW site closed ^[12][10]. The counter-case is that a fall that small, after losing one site and part of another, says holders expect repairs and failover to work. Or they were pricing the wider war: Russian air defences reportedly intercepted several hundred drones across regions over the same days ^[17].

Should the strikes keep coming at this rate, Yandex has to rebuild Sasovo and Vladimir, and that budget comes out of money that would otherwise add new capacity. Cryptobriefing, citing research findings, describes the strikes as Ukrainian retaliation for Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres in late September and October ^[16]. If that account holds, the pace on one side may track the pace on the other. A quick return of the services Yandex said were unavailable ^[9] would make the 4% look like a fair price for a repairable problem.

In our view, physical attack is now a cost of running cloud capacity in Russia, and so far customers have paid it in downtime more than shareholders have paid it in the share price. A fast restoration, with the shares back above their pre-strike level, would show we overstated it.