Russia Plans Underground Data Centers After Ukrainian Drone Hits

Underground options and a policy shift

State-owned telecom Rostelcom has raised the idea of moving some data centers underground in talks with mining company Norilsk, according to Vedomosti. Data Center Dynamics also pointed to a proposal from a Russian regional governor to build facilities inside open-pit coal mines, with green public parks planted on top as camouflage.

On November 2, Vladimir Putin signed a decree requiring data center operators to set aside 10 percent of available space and capacity for government needs, Meduza reported. The decree also lets a special government commission, working with the Federal Security Service, approve the use of foreign data centers. That is a notable reversal, because the "Sovereign Internet Law" had kept Russian companies from using cloud infrastructure outside the country.

A centralized system under strain

Russia's push for a sovereign, increasingly closed internet has produced a highly centralized system dominated by a few companies such as Yandex. The strikes exposed that weakness, causing widespread outages in payment and digital banking apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming, ride-hailing and food delivery. Yandex has had to relocate all three of its main supercomputers after the AI data centers that housed them were targeted, Meduza reported.

Ukraine's decentralized services have held up far better despite years of attacks. The government has dispersed key energy and telecom nodes and buried more supporting infrastructure. Amazon and Microsoft helped move government resources and critical services to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe soon after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and Ukraine uses Starlink terminals, funded by the United States and countries such as Poland and Germany, as backup communications.