Son of a Russian Federal Security Service general helps run a company selling mobile data centers amid Ukrainian drone strikes, BBC reports

Russian companies have been preparing for attacks on data centers before Ukraine began striking them, according to the BBC Russian Service. The demand for mobile data centers has surged since late summer, with IT companies, mobile operators, and medium to large businesses seeking more computing power than standard PCs. One supplier is linked to Boris Korolev, the son of a senior FSB general.

Yadro, part of X Holding, produces containerized data centers, known as Borey, which cost between 18 to 25 million rubles without servers, with prices increasing to hundreds of millions of rubles when equipped with computing hardware. The units have been available for sale for several months. Industry insiders had warned that attacks on Russian data centers were inevitable.

Two-thirds of the nation's data centers are located in the Moscow region and St. Petersburg. On October 6, Deputy Digital Development Minister Yevgeny Filatov advised companies to relocate computing capacity "somewhere beyond the Urals," where strikes had not yet reached. Between October 8 and 11, Ukraine targeted three of Yandex's six data centers: in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir.

These attacks disrupted Yandex's services and those of other companies, affecting their supercomputers "Chervonenkis," "Lyapunov," and "Galushkin." It is expected that replacing damaged equipment could take around six months. Boris Korolev became a deputy CEO of X Holding in 2023, after acquiring a stake in the company following the death of its founder, Anton Cherepennikov.

The extent of his assets' influence is unclear, but X Holding supplies equipment for internet traffic filtering systems, with the government allocating 60 billion rubles for such purposes over the next three years.