Replacing equipment at Yandex data centers damaged by Ukrainian drone strikes will take about six months, Kommersant reports

Replacing the equipment destroyed in Ukrainian strikes on Yandex’s data centers could take up to six months, sources in the IT market told the Russian business daily Kommersant.

Yandex will likely begin buying equipment through various channels, including foreign ones, to replace what was lost more quickly, the outlet’s sources said. Prices for “hardware” are expected to rise in the short term, and Yandex will have to buy equipment “on the most expensive market in recent years,” the sources said.

“These were very large data centers, and since they were built, a global shortage and price increase for computing power, especially AI accelerators, has begun. Equipping them is going to be expensive and lengthy,” Sergei Kudryashov of Strategy Partners told the outlet.

The additional costs will ultimately lead to higher prices for cloud services for customers, the outlet’s sources said.

Ukrainian drones have struck three of Yandex’s six known data centers over the past several days. Users in Russia and abroad have faced outages in Yandex’s services, including its taxi service. Yandex itself restricted downloads from its Yandex Disk cloud storage service in order to “maintain the operability” of its other services after the attack on the data centers.