Ukrainian drones attack Russia’s largest Sberbank data center, under construction in the Saratov Region

On October 14, a Ukrainian drone attack on Balakovo, located in Saratov Region, caused damage to several residential buildings and resulted in one fatality, as reported by regional governor Roman Busargin. Ukraine's Supernova+ monitoring channel claims that the Sberbank data center under construction in the city was struck, a conclusion supported by Astra's OSINT analysis.

Photos from the site show the damage to both the data center building and a nearby hangar. Sberbank notified the state-owned news agency TASS about the attack, but assured that its systems and services remained functional. An eyewitness video displays a bright flash followed by a power outage in several nearby houses, suggesting that the nearby RES facility might have also been targeted.

The attack location is home to an industrial zone that includes the TETs-4 combined heat and power plant, a district electric grid facility, and a railcar plant. The power cuts observed in a residential block could indicate that the RES facility was also hit. The memorandum for building the Balakovo data center was signed in December 2020 between Sberbank, the Saratov Region government, and Rosseti.

The facility was set to become Sberbank's largest in Russia, accommodating approximately 120,000 servers on a 60,000 square meter site. Completion was initially planned for the first quarter of 2027, but the impact of the attack on these plans remains unclear. Additionally, drones have also attacked two Yandex data centers in Kaluga within a two-day span, causing significant damage to a major facility.

Replacing equipment at the affected Yandex sites may take months as cloud services remain in emergency mode.