Russian companies are seeking more data-center capacity abroad, especially in Kazakhstan, as drone strikes hit sites in Russia and the country’s cloud market runs close to capacity. Yandex says it recovered access to about 97% of user data affected by attacks on its centers last month, but permanently lost the remaining 3%.

Why businesses are looking abroad

Russian business daily Kommersant reported a sharp rise in demand for foreign capacity over the past month. Yevgeny Svidersky, vice president of cloud services at ITGlobal.com, said interest had grown particularly for data centers in Kazakhstan. Some companies are moving services overseas; others want foreign facilities only to keep backup copies of their existing systems.

The search comes as domestic cloud resources are under pressure. Kommersant reported that almost 90% of available capacity was occupied. On November 2, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree requiring private data centers to reserve 10% of capacity for Russian information resources. Authorities can take control of that reserved capacity within 24 hours if needed.

What the attacks have disrupted

Index.hr reported that Ukrainian drones struck three Yandex data centers, a Sberbank facility under construction and a VK data center between October 8 and 18. The Moscow Times reported that attacks on Yandex facilities between October 8 and 11 disrupted services including taxi bookings, food delivery, maps, email, banking and streaming. Government bodies and private companies that rely on Yandex infrastructure were also affected.

Yandex attributed the permanent loss of data to critical equipment damage and to some customers not having external backups. The company said customers with automatic backups enabled lost no data. It has since made automatic backups the default for new virtual cloud servers and says engineers are spreading computing workloads across a wider network of data centers in Russia.

The company also said specialized supercomputers at two attacked sites escaped damage and were moved to other locations. The sources do not specify how much data was permanently lost in specific categories or identify the customers affected.

The attacks are part of a wider pattern of strikes on digital infrastructure. Index.hr reported that a Russian attack on September 23 damaged a Kyiv data center with equipment belonging to internet provider UTELS and affected cloud service Fex.net. The disruption cut internet access for about 100,000 households in Kyiv. Index.hr said Russia had increasingly targeted Ukrainian digital infrastructure since that attack.

Why data-center capacity matters beyond cloud services

Index.hr assessed that Ukrainian strikes could slow Russia’s artificial-intelligence development and harm military technology. It noted that military AI programs, while traditionally separate from commercial ones, depend on many of the same computing resources, advanced chips and civilian specialists. Western sanctions, the outlet said, make it harder to replace damaged equipment.

Some companies are moving services abroad, while others are seeking foreign data centers only to back up existing infrastructure. The sources do not give a total number of firms seeking capacity abroad or quantify how much computing demand has shifted.