Russia Considers Burying Data Centers Underground to Evade Drone Strikes

Ukrainian drone strikes are forcing Russian tech companies to consider a radical infrastructure shift: burying their digital backbone deep underground. Recent retaliatory attacks have damaged facilities housing artificial intelligence supercomputers and disrupted cloud services for millions of users, targeting giants like Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte, and the Ministry of Finance.

These strikes follow months of Russian bombardment targeting Ukrainian data centers. In response to the mounting physical vulnerability, state-owned telecommunication company Rostelecom has discussed moving critical facilities underground in talks with mining firm Norilsk. Meanwhile, a regional governor proposed building data centers inside open-pit coal mines while masking the sites with public parks for camouflage.

The Kremlin is also mandating that data center operators reserve computing capacity for state emergencies and has authorized the potential use of foreign facilities. This suggests that physical security has suddenly eclipsed cybersecurity as the primary existential threat for autocratic cloud infrastructure. That would mean the future of state-backed computing in prolonged conflicts may depend less on software resilience and more on heavy civil engineering.