I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.
Modified cropduster AEW drones for detection and coordination, airburst howitzer rounds for initial sweeping, camera controlled Gatling guns for the ones escaped it, and conventional warhead SRBM for launch sites. Should be both budget and methods proportionate.
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/dronr gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
This is your regularly scheduled wake-up call on HN that (1) Dyson Spheres are built around stars, not planets, and (2) it is way way more difficult and energetic to launch outwards than inwards. Just ask any comet.
Releasing drone swarms wrapping in chaff with IR lamps or laser diodes to account for different guidance methods. They cluster around predicted trajectory. Could be more cost effective than a Patriot battery
They don't all have to be drones in the conventional sense. A subset could be a set of balloons with different amounts of helium, an arduino/servos that control one or more fans for directional and limited altitude control, and a box/release with chaff inside.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
I look forward to anthropic drone swarms defending against AWS mounted infantry and OpenAI cruise drones. SpaceX is at war with Pepsi. SpaceX had always been at war with Pepsi.
The genie is out of the bottle, over the next 100 years this is a real problem US, China, and Europe will face.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
It's already happened to Amazon once, and they were not able to recover the data from the destroyed data centre, so they have already experienced this and have some data on which to make those decisions.
If you are referring to the recent UAE datacenter attacks, AFAIK Amazon's services worked as advertised, but obviously a redundant resource is only as good as the number of copies you have left, and eventually 3 of 3 datacenters were hit.
Apparently not all AWS resources are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. different region) or not.
This is one of the factors driving the development of orbital satellite data centers. While satellites are also vulnerable, they are at least somewhat harder to hit than a stationary terrestrial data center. For now it's questionable whether such constellations are feasible due to concerns over launch costs and cooling but some people are taking it seriously.
The difference is that to hit stationary terrestrial data center in the USA you'd need to go through multiple layers of defense systems, not to mention it would probably be an act of war.
As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.
Nah. There's no practical way to jam tight beam satellite data links unless you place the jammer near the ground terminal. And the US government has already stated that they would consider kinetic strikes on US-owned commercial satellites as an act of war.
Yes, striking a data center in the US would also be an act of war. But deterrence isn't very effective against hybrid or "gray zone" warfare. Let's say a drone swarm launched from a random shipping container destroys an Amazon data center in Virginia. US intelligence analysts determine with 80% confidence that the attack was carried out by a terrorist group sponsored by Russia. Would that justify kinetic retaliation against a nuclear power?
There is value in hardening critical data centers. Whether that means placing them in orbit or underground or equipping them with air defenses remains to be seen.
Oh I'm pretty sure if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike of some massive orders of magnitude of higher cost - I doubt it would be tit-for-tat, but more like sinking a navy/submarines/airforce, or something in the likes of that.
I'm not saying there's no value in hardening data centers (which I'm assuming many already are against fires/earthquakes...), but their location and distribution are as safe as they can be - as in, any attack on them would probably be a declaration of war.
In space you will always have to deal with deniability.
You're really missing the point. Retaliation is uncertain if the USA can't reliably determine which state sponsored a terrorist attack. Russia in particular has gotten fairly good at this lately. We think they have sponsored a series of arsons and assassinations in other NATO / EU countries but so far there's no hard evidence that would stand up in a criminal court (or at least nothing publicly released). They seem to be trying to stay just under the threshold that would trigger NATO Article 5.
Kinetic attacks against satellites would be less deniable. All major launches and orbiting objects are tracked so it would generally be possible to trace any weapon back to a specific country.
> if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike
How do you know that this has not happened yet?
How many NATO forests had burnt to a crisp in the last two years. How many Americans lose their homes or their lives on those? Why so many disposable local idiots wake up some day with the same idea to provoke a wildfire near their city just now? Or to riot in Europe just now?
Any response from USA or Europe yet?
All that they need is to detect, isolate and groom a local moron from the other coin of the planet, And if is caught, is not their problem.
In addition to all the engineering problems associated with cooling those data centers and the shields that you'd need against cosmic rays, those things would only accelerate Kessler syndrome.
Yeah, it still is. You might not get a permanent runaway Kessler effect, but you could still have an event that denies access to LEO for several years before it clears.
An event at one orbital altitude is also not confined to that altitude; debris can reach higher altitudes and affect satellites in those orbits.
You could do a ghaza and park human shields over military relevant infrastructure? Introducing Host.Age housing the only housing with free heating, free warn water and free leftover tokens .
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
I don't know what sites you frequent but strikes on distribution centers by both sides has been covered by mainstream US news.
Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?
I seem to recall that this is optimal game theoretic strategy - don't initiate, but always immediately retaliate.
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
Apparently Wildberries carried over 1/4 million items tagged as "for SMO" (Special Military Operation), so they had become a major part of the supply chain for Putin's war, which is why they were hit.
In the case of Wildberries we're not talking about "dual use" items like a sleeping bag that your government fails to provide you, we're talking about specifically tagging items (1/4 million of them!!) as being for the war. It's Wildberries' business (literally) if they want to be a supplier for the war, and profit from it, but obviously that does mean they become a target.
Cutting off the enemy supply line is a classic and obvious military strategy. Ukraine didn't choose to be attacked, nor did they choose for Wildberries to become part of the supply line. They are playing the cards they were dealt, and I would say doing so with remarkable restraint.
Ukrainian military and security officials have stated on and off the record that a major objective of the Wildberries strikes was civilian terror. Russia has taken them at exactly their word.
of course that'd be fine, under the Geneva convention a civilian object loses its protective status when it makes effective military contributions and its destruction confers a military advantage.
What's supposed to be the argument against it, inconvenience for American shoppers during a war of aggression?
I don't think the Geneva convention is that unequivocal, I believe there's also a duty to assess proportionality of military advantage vs. civilian risk.
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralises. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
They just re-host it on chinese clouds. Most of european part of russia dont have mobile internet for years now and it did not change much for people living there.
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.
> So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.
The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).
If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.
In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
A lot of the smaller drones that Ukraine is using only do limited damage - they may start a fire than can spread, but not doing to destroy an entire larger facility (although the Flamingo can do significant damage). Many Russian energy facilities just get hit repeatedly over time - Russia will fix as fast as they can. Staggering hits seems to make sense.
Energy facilities have the destructive energy stockpiled on-site. Don't need to fly in much force yourself.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.
I think the energy facilities being hit are mostly refineries - not storage, and anyways any bulk storage is just temporary for bulk transport for export or to the front, etc, so having it in 25gal cans wouldn't be very helpful!
Countries still have strategic reserves, but usually of crude, not refined product --> decentralized reserves would help with supply cuts by any cause. The benefit would be too individual vs export/frontlines, so won't happen.
Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
Probably phoned it in because they know the ukranians can just not use yandex maps to bomb russia. But hey, boss gives you a dumb easy job you don't argue.
What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
The problem is Russians are too afraid to turn on their motherland because "reasons" but that is exactly what has to happen to end the war. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it.
Americans are so naive about the "turn on their motherland" part. It's not really a reply to you, I just remembered some american whom I met and he was treating us as kids, saying things as "alone you are weak but together you are strong!"
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people?
You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
When Navalny came back, over 300 000 people came out to protest, despite being terrorized. That did nothing. It's not like those people had guns and were ready to use them. And even if they did, that would only be an additional argument to use extra power of Putin's police state. Heck, if people did that, the very same "European anti-Putinists" would heavily condemn the violence and would support the crackdown on the "violent protestors" ("The future of the country is in stability and communication, not in violence. We urge people to lower their weapons. We support President Putin's attempts to keep the country stable and do what is necessary. We will send him an additional supply of tear gas and protest dispersal equipment. EU and Russia must stand together in these trying times.").
"The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."
Russians won't storm anything, but if you observe their actual behavior, it's easy to see that they don't attribute their problems to Ukraine. No one is volunteering to go fight there without very high signup bonuses and salaries.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Seems like the majority of people are uneducated to this extreme degree. Including the very highest leaders of the EU and the USA.
You know, things like coups exist. In many, many other countries leadership as bad as Russia's would have been ousted in a military coup long time ago, and the new regime would have pursued saner policy.
What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.
I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.
Your opinions are much better thought-out than the most I have seen. I respect that. But you have several severe errors in your thinking I will try to convince you of:
1. Russia's military is not independent. FSB is above them. This "cutting the balls of the military" has been a long-term strategy. This is not comparable at all with the USA, let alone Turkey.
2. Military, power, strength resources are purposefully divided between different players, military does not have a monopoly on power. There are also FSB (with their own forces, judges, prison, killing teams), National Guard (have tanks), Private Companies (decreased/fractured after the Wagner debacle). Heck, Kadyrov's thugs are part of that equation as well.
3. There really aren't examples of successful coups from the bottom only.
4. No, I do not suggest negotiations with Putin, quite the opposite. Way more should be done to get rid of him and his family personally, and not pussyfoot around it.
5. EU's problem was and still is anemic, slow and stupid action (lack of). Damn morons.
6. No, a significant portion of the population does not support the war. Do North Koreans truly support their regime as witnessed by the voting results and by the fact that people are not protesting and are not organizing a coup?
7. Russia had Oligarchs, but doesn't have anymore. Oligarchy means that rich people can influence politics. In Russia they can't. The typical western "money brings political influence/power" does not apply in Russia. In Russia the rule is "political position (given by Putin) brings money (as long as Putin allows)". Businessmen have no independence. Check what happened to Tinkov (Tinkov bank). And he is the lucky one.
> It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
And none of this matters, because Russia has no tradition of democracy and has always been ruled by dictators who derive their legitimacy through other means; mainly through their success in expanding the empire. The more you steal and the more people die in the process, the greater leader you are. Putin is a continuation of that tradition and enjoys widespread support among a population that shares the same vision: that Russia is a chosen nation and that being conquered by Russia is a privilege.
Russian history offers an excellent counterexample in the downfall of the USSR when Gorbachev and others lost their legitimacy. Formally, they remained the top figures in the government; in practice, people gradually stopped following them over a period of a few years as everything was disintegrating (shortage of basic products, pointless war in Afghanistan, disasters like Chernobyl, etc). The people simply chose new leaders from among themselves and turned their backs to Moscow.
For example, a police station might've simply ignored orders from the ministry of internal affairs and instead followed the recommendations of a popular local figure (often a factory manager, uni professor, journalist, artist or writer). As districts increasingly acted this way, Moscow gradually lost control over the police force, which became decentralized and locally run. In the end, bosses in Moscow could yell all they wanted into a phone, but that did not move a single police officer on the ground.
Russian central government is currently nowhere near such loss of legitimacy. Tens of millions of people carry out the orders of their Führer every day. Some have stepped into a foreign country while carrying a gun. Others are milling artillery shells or programming cruise missiles. Some are sitting on HN trying to convince the world how their Führer has no other option than to murder Ukrainian children every night.
There is no pushback worth mentioning. Last year, out of 140 million people living in Russia, only 38 were arrested for anti-war protests. Russians on HN will gladly explain how oppressive the climate in Russia has become and how difficult it is to protest, but they fail to recognize the downstream effects: that Ukrainians have to pay with their lives every single day for the cancer that the cowardice of Russians has unleashed. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are in mortal danger right now, trying to stop what Russians are too afraid to confront themselves.
Stop with the nonsense. You can actually see the real voting results from the foreign voting stations (Helsinki, Berlin, etc). The support of antiwar candidates is overwhelming. Putin's United Russia party gets very few votes, and even those typically come from pensioners and people who moved abroad 20+ years ago. These are the facts.
> It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy
It doesn't matter, just like it didn't matter to British citizenry who endured the blitz that the Nazis had autocouped, and Germans couldn't vote Hitler out. They simply had to fight back.
The occupation will clearly not happen, therefore the most reasonable amd rational strategy is to hide your own feelings, not to do anything drastic that would endanger yourself, and just wait until the dictator dies.
Like the US, they are concerned about the cost of fuel and food. They, however, do not have a democratic process to fall back to, and therefore no hope of controlling these factors, ever. I suspect they would be a lot more willing to form a real rebellion once the issues get bad enough at Putins hand.
That's too late for that fear. Ukrainian strikes on refineries and "Russian Amazon's" warehouses have already changed the sentiment. That's a great gift from Zelensky to Putin.
> The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like?
I don't think that's the primary goal here anyway, it's to disrupt the Russian economy so that it becomes harder to recruit, provision and rearm their war effort.
Though, like the Wildberries attacks, it's likely that these datacentres are also being used by the military for data processing too. The Russian military certainly aren't as worried about US/Europeans about using civilian infrastructure for their military efforts.
Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
You also set up Hormuz and tariffs and spread discord between EU citiz ns through speeches of high officials and threaten Greenland, causing us to prepare to defend on multiple fronts while often publicly supporting Russia too.
The only reason the war has turned lately is because the USA was the greatest defensive shield for the Russians, by demanding that Ukraine not cross the red line of the border.
In Vietnam, the USSR gave a considerable amount of equipment to Vietnam, they stationed 3,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and over a dozen of them were killed. The USSR told Vietnam where B-52s were heading so they could evacuate military leaders and get other military units out of the way. Soviet crews were firing SAMs at F-4 Phantoms and shooting them down, and Soviet pilots were flying planes.
When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not have the domestic capability to build Stinger missiles themselves...
It's fine. Putin doesn't even know how to use computers, let alone Internet. So all this is not bothering him at all. And he is the only person who can decide to stop the war; nobody else has that ability.
Will it be possible? Yes. Will it be easy, or cheap? No.
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
great question, I don't have a good answer. supposedly there are gpus, here you can rent a H200 (a GPU which was released after the war had started)
https://selectel.ru/services/dedicated/hgx-h200/
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
During the early days of the Russian invasion in 2022, it was realized that almost all of Ukraine's redundant offsite backups were in various locations in Kyiv.
Except that nuclear reactors are very robustly built, unlike data centers. Nuclear stations are designed to withstand against the airplane dropping in.
Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.
Maybe the rules have changed in the US, but as of early 2023 SMRs were subject to the same "Aircraft Rule" regarding they're containment structures as any other commercial reactor.
If we regard large nuclear power stations as emblematic of centralized power generation, rather than just the nuclear aspect of it, then another target is the step-up transformer and the rest of the connection to the transmission grid.
I don't think those are designed to withstand an aircraft dropping in, nor would their destruction count as the use of nuclear weapons.
I agree. The only real argument against large nuclear reactors is the negative security aspect. All other arguments are nonsense as far as I am concerned. Even this aspect can be reduced by using smaller reactors. The existence of a negative argument doesn't mean it should influence our decisions in the long run. In general, the argument is real but isn't significant enough to be taken seriously.
Outside say redundancy across sites (a thing many offer in one way or another) ... there's not much you can DO.
When I used to work with US bank and financial institutions we used to do "disaster recovery tests" and it effectively meant they shut off a whole site and ran on their backups to see what happened.
Well that's a long way of saying even in military offensive scenarios, Amazon is expected to have some zone up to use which is to say they're doing a decent job.
Contrast with no AZ now or in the next quarter. Then surely people would take precautions like switching to Google or equinix at a minimum.
Preferably after they thought a little more about the more regular fire and/or water ingress hazards.
Now that you can stuff an entire room with only high-G-resistant solid state drives, there should be fewer excuses for losing machines before determining a fire suppression system to be either inoperable or insufficient (but never tested and measured under realistic conditions).
Space launches have never been "safe". It's always a risky endeavor for a variety of reasons.
But concerns over space junk are vastly overblown. Orbit is a big place and satellites can maneuver to avoid the riskiest paths. And if data center satellites ever actually get launched (might never happen) then they'll be in low orbit where any junk will burn up within a few years.
I should have qualified my usage of the term safe. Space launches of course have risks, because space is hard. I was simply trying to highlight that more space junk whizzing by at very very fast speeds could cause major damage and NASA & ISS have always been worried about this.
The Yandex of today isn't exactly the Yandex of 2020. The people who were at the helm back then whitewashed their reputations, renamed to Nebius, and are now supplying compute to Palantir.
What you even talking about ? What this have to do with Navalny ? (self sacrificing activist populist on the USAID payroll with an agenda dictated from Yale)
The Internet is almost 100% packet switching, a technique that someone brilliant in ARPA came up with the idea of claiming it was intended for nuclear warfare survival, in order to ensure funding.
“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.
It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
>It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
In the current climate I think the less project approvals you need to get the better
This is a revolutionary concept that you've discovered in 2026 that was more or less universally observed until the 21st century.
It's what I've been saying all along. Data centers are only an evolutionary, external manifestation of things which have existed all along.
When computing resources became accessible to the average company, average companies introduced machine rooms. Below-average companies stashed computers in a closet or non-dedicated space, but the point is, that for decades, ordinary businesses had an ordinary complement of on-prem compute.
The whole point of data centers is economy of scale, consolidation, and centralization. The whole point of "cloud services" is to aggregate services where they can be provided to dozens, hundreds, thousands of tenant companies and individuals, rather than everyone federating their machine rooms and closets in every location everywhere.
It is the ultimate paradigm shift of "thin client connects to time-share servers" being recapitulated. Instead of TN3270 and IBM's mainframes, we have AWS, Chromebooks, and mobile apps.
Why do you think there is a crisis in commercial properties and office space. Many companies have gutted their capex servers and networking gear because they moved to the cloud. New companies basically don't need to build out an enormous, resilient physical plant to support those resources, if they're cloud-based.
So if you believe that the entire tech industry is gonna reverse course, just because of the threat of some DCs being reduced to slag and melted rare earth, you live in a fantasy world, my friend.
I’m a bit older than that: I have lived the swing from centralized remote computing (long lines and/or dial in, both to the mainframe) to distributed local computing, back to centralized computing.
I remember datacenters being close to the humans and then migrating to be close to the power supply (check out The Dallas, OR, for example) to now locating where they can and scrambling for power, which has become the bottleneck.
At this point I think there’s a diseconomy of scale with the need for all these ad hoc power systems.
I’m not suggesting a return to the captive “machine room”. I’m saying that instead of a mega-plant, smaller, distributed ones might actually be a local optimum.
(Oh, and I have had a rack full of hardware in a data center for my personal compute for more than a quarter century. So yes, I have some experience in history)
From reddit - "Right now, Yandex's biggest services are down: taxis, delivery, and Alisa. Moscow is paralyzed; it's impossible to order a taxi. Orders aren't going through."
7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable
Morelli explains this principle or commandment as follows: "With rare exceptions, people tend to join the victorious cause. In the case of war, the preference of public opinion depends very much on the apparent results of the conflict. If the results are not good, the propaganda must disguise our losses and exaggerate those of the enemy." [0]
You're not going to get Russians' point of view from Kremlin shills. The Russians that I know are utterly disgusted by what is going on in their country but they are not going to speak out publicly for fear of reprisals on their families.
All the Russians I know are outside Russia, for obvious reasons. I have zero idea what an average Russian in Russia thinks. Some distant acquiantances wrote some scary stuff on Facebook some years back. Mind, highly intelligent and educated people.
And with all respect, I'd hazard an unsubstantiated guess: you don't really know what average Russian thinks either, as you're probably in contact with Russian intelligentsia.
If you gear up with a translator, you may read this in-depth post on the events made by well-known Ukrainian tech executive Sergiy Petrenko, who also happened to be the CEO of the Ukrainian branch of Yandex in its early days:
234 comments
[ 31.1 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadhttps://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/28/russia-lets-privat...
We felt a lot of it was… unnervingly believable in multiple aspects.
I do not look forward to the “Seretech Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Seretech_Decision), “Shiawase Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Shiawase_Decision) or similar sorts of judicial rulings in the real world.
I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.
It did not help the Iranians and their nuclear facilities.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
Looking like we be getting Obelisks from Command and Conquer soon. Personally I preferred prism towers.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
Apparently not all AWS resources are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. different region) or not.
https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind
As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.
I feel like China and US are the only ones in the next 50 years who'll have launch capability cheap enough to hit satellites.
I don't get the defense argument for space data centers.
There is value in hardening critical data centers. Whether that means placing them in orbit or underground or equipping them with air defenses remains to be seen.
I'm not saying there's no value in hardening data centers (which I'm assuming many already are against fires/earthquakes...), but their location and distribution are as safe as they can be - as in, any attack on them would probably be a declaration of war.
In space you will always have to deal with deniability.
Kinetic attacks against satellites would be less deniable. All major launches and orbiting objects are tracked so it would generally be possible to trace any weapon back to a specific country.
How do you know that this has not happened yet?
How many NATO forests had burnt to a crisp in the last two years. How many Americans lose their homes or their lives on those? Why so many disposable local idiots wake up some day with the same idea to provoke a wildfire near their city just now? Or to riot in Europe just now?
Any response from USA or Europe yet?
All that they need is to detect, isolate and groom a local moron from the other coin of the planet, And if is caught, is not their problem.
An event at one orbital altitude is also not confined to that altitude; debris can reach higher altitudes and affect satellites in those orbits.
Ask the US bases around the gulf who well the Patriots and other systems worked.
I haven't seen any site I frequent mention this once. The PR bubble is very real.
Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?
Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).
Cutting off the enemy supply line is a classic and obvious military strategy. Ukraine didn't choose to be attacked, nor did they choose for Wildberries to become part of the supply line. They are playing the cards they were dealt, and I would say doing so with remarkable restraint.
What's supposed to be the argument against it, inconvenience for American shoppers during a war of aggression?
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralises. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
Isn't it difficult to get access to Chinese clouds without having legal entities registered in China?
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
Russia isn't a Western Democracy.
That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.
The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).
If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.
In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
The only value his coup provided to Ukraine was being a distraction. If they had succeeded, the war would have continued.
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people? You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
"The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."
They closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed.
They are not tenants, or peasants working for lords, they are citizens.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Seems like the majority of people are uneducated to this extreme degree. Including the very highest leaders of the EU and the USA.
What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.
I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.
1. Russia's military is not independent. FSB is above them. This "cutting the balls of the military" has been a long-term strategy. This is not comparable at all with the USA, let alone Turkey.
2. Military, power, strength resources are purposefully divided between different players, military does not have a monopoly on power. There are also FSB (with their own forces, judges, prison, killing teams), National Guard (have tanks), Private Companies (decreased/fractured after the Wagner debacle). Heck, Kadyrov's thugs are part of that equation as well.
3. There really aren't examples of successful coups from the bottom only.
4. No, I do not suggest negotiations with Putin, quite the opposite. Way more should be done to get rid of him and his family personally, and not pussyfoot around it.
5. EU's problem was and still is anemic, slow and stupid action (lack of). Damn morons.
6. No, a significant portion of the population does not support the war. Do North Koreans truly support their regime as witnessed by the voting results and by the fact that people are not protesting and are not organizing a coup?
7. Russia had Oligarchs, but doesn't have anymore. Oligarchy means that rich people can influence politics. In Russia they can't. The typical western "money brings political influence/power" does not apply in Russia. In Russia the rule is "political position (given by Putin) brings money (as long as Putin allows)". Businessmen have no independence. Check what happened to Tinkov (Tinkov bank). And he is the lucky one.
Russian history offers an excellent counterexample in the downfall of the USSR when Gorbachev and others lost their legitimacy. Formally, they remained the top figures in the government; in practice, people gradually stopped following them over a period of a few years as everything was disintegrating (shortage of basic products, pointless war in Afghanistan, disasters like Chernobyl, etc). The people simply chose new leaders from among themselves and turned their backs to Moscow.
For example, a police station might've simply ignored orders from the ministry of internal affairs and instead followed the recommendations of a popular local figure (often a factory manager, uni professor, journalist, artist or writer). As districts increasingly acted this way, Moscow gradually lost control over the police force, which became decentralized and locally run. In the end, bosses in Moscow could yell all they wanted into a phone, but that did not move a single police officer on the ground.
Russian central government is currently nowhere near such loss of legitimacy. Tens of millions of people carry out the orders of their Führer every day. Some have stepped into a foreign country while carrying a gun. Others are milling artillery shells or programming cruise missiles. Some are sitting on HN trying to convince the world how their Führer has no other option than to murder Ukrainian children every night.
There is no pushback worth mentioning. Last year, out of 140 million people living in Russia, only 38 were arrested for anti-war protests. Russians on HN will gladly explain how oppressive the climate in Russia has become and how difficult it is to protest, but they fail to recognize the downstream effects: that Ukrainians have to pay with their lives every single day for the cancer that the cowardice of Russians has unleashed. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are in mortal danger right now, trying to stop what Russians are too afraid to confront themselves.
It doesn't matter, just like it didn't matter to British citizenry who endured the blitz that the Nazis had autocouped, and Germans couldn't vote Hitler out. They simply had to fight back.
That's too late for that fear. Ukrainian strikes on refineries and "Russian Amazon's" warehouses have already changed the sentiment. That's a great gift from Zelensky to Putin.
I don't think that's the primary goal here anyway, it's to disrupt the Russian economy so that it becomes harder to recruit, provision and rearm their war effort.
Though, like the Wildberries attacks, it's likely that these datacentres are also being used by the military for data processing too. The Russian military certainly aren't as worried about US/Europeans about using civilian infrastructure for their military efforts.
It is the west waging war against them through Ukraine. This is not the first time in history it happens.
You are so brainwashed, that this basic truth is interpreted by you as "fake news".
And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:
> According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:
> Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.
> The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.
> American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.
> US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-helps-u...
Translated, we give them the missiles, we give them the intelligence, we give them the target, we set it up… we let them push the red button.
Are you sure the missiles are support?
The ones hitting the data centers are I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Point_FP-1
I don't think the US even has any like that to give.
Is not a gift if you pay for it.
When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not have the domestic capability to build Stinger missiles themselves...
It's probably one of the safest places on the planet.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_shrubland
As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.
It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.
But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/drone-and-data-ce...
we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure
Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.
I don't think those are designed to withstand an aircraft dropping in, nor would their destruction count as the use of nuclear weapons.
When I used to work with US bank and financial institutions we used to do "disaster recovery tests" and it effectively meant they shut off a whole site and ran on their backups to see what happened.
AT&T used to put telecom switches in bunkers.
Contrast with no AZ now or in the next quarter. Then surely people would take precautions like switching to Google or equinix at a minimum.
Now that you can stuff an entire room with only high-G-resistant solid state drives, there should be fewer excuses for losing machines before determining a fire suppression system to be either inoperable or insufficient (but never tested and measured under realistic conditions).
Say goodbye to safe space launches...
But concerns over space junk are vastly overblown. Orbit is a big place and satellites can maneuver to avoid the riskiest paths. And if data center satellites ever actually get launched (might never happen) then they'll be in low orbit where any junk will burn up within a few years.
Here's a better source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
(looks like they changed "center" to "centre")
April 27, 2020:
"Yandex highlighted negative articles about Navalny in its search results; the company called it an "experiment."
https://zona-media.translate.goog/news/2020/04/27/navyandex?...
It's a totally different situation - they're at war.
“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.
It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
In the current climate I think the less project approvals you need to get the better
This is a revolutionary concept that you've discovered in 2026 that was more or less universally observed until the 21st century.
It's what I've been saying all along. Data centers are only an evolutionary, external manifestation of things which have existed all along.
When computing resources became accessible to the average company, average companies introduced machine rooms. Below-average companies stashed computers in a closet or non-dedicated space, but the point is, that for decades, ordinary businesses had an ordinary complement of on-prem compute.
The whole point of data centers is economy of scale, consolidation, and centralization. The whole point of "cloud services" is to aggregate services where they can be provided to dozens, hundreds, thousands of tenant companies and individuals, rather than everyone federating their machine rooms and closets in every location everywhere.
It is the ultimate paradigm shift of "thin client connects to time-share servers" being recapitulated. Instead of TN3270 and IBM's mainframes, we have AWS, Chromebooks, and mobile apps.
Why do you think there is a crisis in commercial properties and office space. Many companies have gutted their capex servers and networking gear because they moved to the cloud. New companies basically don't need to build out an enormous, resilient physical plant to support those resources, if they're cloud-based.
So if you believe that the entire tech industry is gonna reverse course, just because of the threat of some DCs being reduced to slag and melted rare earth, you live in a fantasy world, my friend.
I remember datacenters being close to the humans and then migrating to be close to the power supply (check out The Dallas, OR, for example) to now locating where they can and scrambling for power, which has become the bottleneck.
At this point I think there’s a diseconomy of scale with the need for all these ad hoc power systems.
I’m not suggesting a return to the captive “machine room”. I’m saying that instead of a mega-plant, smaller, distributed ones might actually be a local optimum.
(Oh, and I have had a rack full of hardware in a data center for my personal compute for more than a quarter century. So yes, I have some experience in history)
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1x1q...
Morelli explains this principle or commandment as follows: "With rare exceptions, people tend to join the victorious cause. In the case of war, the preference of public opinion depends very much on the apparent results of the conflict. If the results are not good, the propaganda must disguise our losses and exaggerate those of the enemy." [0]
It's the same in Russia, if you are wondering
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Principles_of_War_Pr...
[Edit]: I guess I meant to say, I'd love to understand Russians' point of view. I don't understand at all.
And with all respect, I'd hazard an unsubstantiated guess: you don't really know what average Russian thinks either, as you're probably in contact with Russian intelligentsia.
https://blognot.co/ataka-na-yandeks-v-sasovo/
A second data centre has been attacked and I've seen reports of Yandex crawlers stopping their work.