Server siege: Kremlin gives private data centers 10 days to carve out capacity for the state

The Russian companies that run the country’s largest server farms, from Yandex to Sberbank to VK, have spent a decade building out capacity for consumer apps, cloud storage and AI training. From this week, a slice of that infrastructure is no longer purely theirs to allocate.

President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed a decree ordering private data-center operators in Russia to reserve 10 percent of their floor space and computing capacity for state information resources, with a compliance deadline of 10 days from the decree’s entry into force. A newly empowered subcommission under the government commission on digital development can order the reserved slice handed over within 24 hours of a notice.

The preamble ties the measure to “unfriendly actions by certain foreign states,” and the Kremlin frames the arrangement as temporary. Federal, regional and municipal data centers are exempt, so the obligation falls squarely on commercial operators.

An FSB gate on foreign cloud

Buried in the text is a separate clause that lets the same subcommission, with the consent of the Federal Security Service, temporarily authorize the use of data centers located abroad.

Independent outlet iStories reported that the subcommission will also set a cap on what operators can charge for the reserved capacity.

The Ministry of Digital Development has been tasked with inventorying private computing capacity and setting operating standards.

A direct answer to the drone campaign

The decree lands at the end of a month in which Ukrainian long-range drones systematically targeted Russian cloud sites. On October 8, drones struck a Yandex facility in Sasovo, Ryazan region, that housed two of the company’s three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis. The fire halted operations and knocked out Yandex Cloud, Yandex Disk and third-party services that run on top of them.

Further strikes on Yandex sites in Kaluga and Vladimir followed within days. On October 14, drones hit a Sberbank data center under construction in Balakovo, Saratov region. Sberbank said all banking systems and online services continued to operate normally, but users across Russia reported outages on Sberbank apps and the GigaChat AI platform.

Together, Yandex, Sberbank and VK carry the backbone of Russia’s consumer internet, from search, payments and ride-hailing to messaging and cloud. Securing state access to that infrastructure is now a stated wartime priority.

Operators have until roughly mid-November to carve out the reserved share. Procedures from the Ministry of Digital Development on how the inventory and allocation will work are still to be published.

This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation