One interesting fact I've heard recently (I live in Poland; we share a border with Ukraine as well as with a part of Russia).
Russia went all in on "digital sovereignty." This is partly because the Russian government cares deeply about censoring what their citizens can see (which they can't do if those citizens consume content from American services), partly because the American services themselves cut Russia off because of sanctions-related concerns.
This makes Russian datacenters a much more attractive target for the Ukrainians. While Russia can (and does) bomb Ukrainian datacenters, the fact that Ukrainians are so reliant on US infrastructure (and could rapidly move local workloads to western clouds if the need was great enough) makes such operations far less attractive. It's much easier for Ukraine to strike some facility near Moscow than it is for Russia to strike Ashburn, Virginia.
Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
I'd heard (from someone trying to use them) that net connections into the Chinese clouds was very busy in the days around the start of the war, so the suggestion is they have critical stuff mirrored there.
It's also been instrumental in supplying Ukraine to the point they had to schedule Russian and Ukrainian delegations around each other in their factories when they were visiting at the same times. [0]
That's precisely the problem. You can't credibly supply both sides in a war where one party clearly is the aggressor and pretend you are neutral. You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
I don't think they're pretending to be neutral. I'm not sure they even think in those categories at all. They'll happily sell as much equipment as they can manufacture for hard cash or barter it for grain, oil or gas as long as the war is going on. They'll start considering options once there's a clear winner on the battlefield.
I think this is why it's so important to figure out a path to returning Königsberg to western control before the war runs its course. If we assume that Russia is basically disassembled and parted out, it's looking increasingly certain that China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of those parts. For the most part this seems inevitable at this point, but there still seems to be a path to keep Königsberg as a western region; and an optimistic can imagine keeping St. Petersburg as well, but I don't see a path for forward action on that before Russia's collapse, and I don't really see how the west can act faster than China once the collapse begins.
China's behavior makes sense if they consider both Russia and Ukraine (the latter being a proxy for the west) to be enemies of some sort. Let your enemies fight each other and waste resources while you yourself profit.
The same can be said about the US <> EU/Russia in this conflict. Why bother helping Ukraine/Europe win the war if you consider them at least partly hostile? Better to let them fight your own enemy (Russia) and trade with both sides to your own advantage.
You seen any of Trump's tweets in the last couple months? It used to be all about China but now he talks about Europe and Canada like we're enemies because he feels like the whole world should only do what he wants.
> You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
Yes, and that helped turn the US into the global hegemony it is today. No wonder China wants a wack. Power doesn't need a conscience.
Ukraine can have servers outside of Ukraine. No meed to have servers in the USA. I dont think these issues are so connected. As long as the servers are somewhere Russia does not dare to bomb.
Even some pro-russian war bloggers are critical of Putin's decision to start striking data centers:
3/ "This summer, faced with the inability to conclude a war that began nearly five years ago, Putin opted for a new round of escalation.
4/ "In June, the Russian Armed Forces began systematically targeting warehouses belonging to the Ukrainian company Nova Poshta, prompting a retaliatory strike on Wildberries warehouses; in September, strikes on Ukrainian data centres began, and a response followed swiftly.
5/ "In other words, one shouldn't assume that no one had thought to attack data centres before; it is simply that Putin decided to take this step right now.
6/ "This move effectively lifted the constraints that had previously bound Ukraine – a country that generally adheres to certain rules of engagement and, with few exceptions, does not initiate attacks on clearly civilian targets.
7/ "Ukraine had been prepared for this scenario almost from the very start of the war – and even before that. Even prior to the invasion, when it was clear to everyone that it was virtually inevitable, a law was passed allowing for the temporary storage of state registries abroad.
...
47/ "The issue is therefore extremely serious — far more so than the strikes on Wildberries, which result in economic damage but do not threaten the functioning of the state itself.
48/ "I believe Putin may have committed his second-biggest blunder since the invasion of Ukraine. He has literally started throwing stones inside a glass house without realizing how fragile that house is. The very system he built prevents him from grasping this;…
49/ …he makes decisions without consulting or listening to anyone, living in his own cozy bubble.
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
The argument is Europe can decide to move servers out of USA and Ukraine is fine because Ukraine does not need servers in USA. They need servers in other countries. That was the logic issue with OP.
Your post is completely unrelated to mine or the above. Maybe wrong thread
I don't think it's unrelated, the text I quoted says Ukraine mirrored some of its critical data abroad, something russia decided against.
I don't disagree with your post, I was just expanding a bit on it.
Yes, those sick psychopaths want to turn Kyiv and other major cities into uninhabitable deserts. They target bridges with regular cars in the middle of the day; attack buses, trains, residential buildings, gas stations, shopping malls, grocery stores, water and gas utilities. They declared a total war on Ukraine and removed all constraints on their methods.
Russia started *somewhat* bombing civilian dual-use infrastructure only after Ukraine started bombing random warehouses in Russia this summer.
It's hilarious how clueless people are in this thread, I guess it's only pro-ukraine bots and incompetent western warmongers.
Russia could've made whole Ukraine in a literal dead state long ago -- it only takes few rockets to permanently knock out nuclear power plants and water treatment plants. Yet they didn't. I wonder why.
For every Ukraine's attack Russia can slam back ten times as hard. So, I guess, previous escalations were futile. I guess after this day Russian retaliation dial will be advanced two-three degrees up.
Blue Yellow - a Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military: https://blue-yellow.lt/en/ (you can specify the purpose for which you are donating, e.g. drones)
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
If in doubt - pick Come Back Alive. They have spotless reputation and invest into long-term projects such as military education and veteran sports/aid.
Yes, I think they are the best. They have strong expertise (for example they were commissioned to conduct studies by Ministry of Defense of Ukraine) and excellent accountability (some is public [0]).
In my eyes one of their highpoints which demonstrates their trustworthiness is the ~20 million dollars payment they received this year by undisclosed European (I think it was European) entity (government or private donors maybe)
Come Back Alive was founded around 2014 and has operated continuously since. This is a conflict where long-term investments pay off.
Also not saying they and others don't do short-term keep-up work - they do. But it's also important to develop education facilities and care for veterans.
That's what people at most other foundation thought in 2022, yet here we're in 2026, and the war is still going.
And to be fair not all Come back alive projects are long term, they provide cars, cables, laptops, portable power stations etc., but these do not engage public enough, so their media team focuses on more interesting projects.
What "long term" means is also differs, they put a lot of effort into their training centers, but now the training cycle of one person is several months (I assume, I don't know exact terms), which is not that long.
Stopify - https://stopify.org.ua/ A charity initiative created by a group of communication specialists and supporters of Ukraine. Legally the donations are collected by a well-known and experienced charity organization, Ziedot.lv, based in Riga, Latvia. All funds go towards purchasing necessary supplies for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, based on their requests to the Embassy of Ukraine in Latvia.
Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.
I am a top Russian CS degree alumna (HSE). I left Russia even before the war, but now most of my uni peers live and work abroad (US, EU, UK, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, etc.). It is similar for the alumni of the other top universities there. And we made the right choice, both ethically and financially/career-wise, imo.
Big respect to each of you, its never easy to move away. Talk is cheap, 10x moreso on internet. Actions define a man / woman and their legacy and self worth.
The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those most skilled left as soon as they could. Some of these, or their children, would go on to found startups.
> The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those [..]
.. were not Russians. USSR itself incorporated besides its native Russian talent 2 talent powerhouses of Ukraine and Armenia. Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse. Armenia was the USSR's silicon valley with hightest per capita of scientists in USSR. There is also Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to consider, all of them active in relative high tech engineering.
Drone units of occupation forces of Russia are primary taegets for AFU and due limited control distance for FPVs, Russian drone units are serving at the zero line, actually. So they are sent to actual front lines constantly (despite what Russia officially claims)
> Most young people with a conscience (which is most people that like to read) leave
No. I am sure that most young people with a conscience remaining. And it is mostly people without a conscience who leaving.
Russia is an extremely poor country, and literally governed by mafia. So generally it is impossible to leave Russia if you are not in top 10% by wealth, and it is almost impossible in Russia to get in those top 10% if you have conscience.
But it means exactly the opposite. For some reason everybody thinks that for people (or even for only one man) who make decisions, Russian economy, talented people, and datacenters has great value or something.
But the only thing that matters is to remain in power. And invading your neighbors country have get those people exactly that.
Within the narrow scope of this
discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
But then again, American soldiers are not dying in that war the way Russian do. That would be different in war against neighbhood nation where you cant hide purely behind technology.
> awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently. And I doubt you’ll find many on this forum defending even the latter.
dont forget afghanistan, Iran Libya, Syria, etc etc. -_- none of these countries is doing well after their "liberation" or after their 'terrorists got bombed' or whatever wording (killed like dogs?) the current leader will have for it.
Out of these four, at least Syria is better off. Everything, literally everything is better than what the Assad regime was. The gruesomeness of Assad and his regime is on a level not seen since 1945.
Afghanistan was an utter failure of all of Western societies. Yes, we provided a generation worth of women with access to schools. But we never provided a way for Afghanistan as a country to stand on its own feet, instead we looked away while one half of the military didn't exist on paper and the other half raped children for funsies (look up "bacha bazi").
Libya... now that is mostly upon us Europeans. Ghaddafi, I'm glad this prick is gone, but again we didn't do anything to meaningfully help Libya grow, and by the time Putin began supporting oppositional warlords, the game was lost.
And Iran... oh dear god what a mess, dating back to the history of the US using Kurds for their aims and then letting them to die without support. This entire shitshow was a disaster from start to finish, even if the idea was noble - the Mullahs slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors the start of this year, it would have been incredibly unethical to just stand aside again.
Feeling if Syria is better off really depends on what sect you are in. But the unhappy groups are being killed iff. Soon only the happy groups will remain.
The idea of nobly saving people is just “think of the children” on the nation-state level. It sounds great but gets used for every politician’s own ends.
> The idea of nobly saving people is just “think of the children” on the nation-state level. It sounds great but gets used for every politician’s own ends.
Well, there's the saying every nerd should know, "with great power comes great responsibility". We have to be caretakers of those who cannot defend themselves, but all we care about is making money, and that ruins the mission from the start.
I was in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan not too long ago (both countries just to the south of Russia, for those not savvy of geography). Met plenty of young russians who moved there recently. I didn't have to ask why. Many of them used to work in the tech sector, it's easy for them to find new work.
Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
Ukraine's estimated population in 2022 was around 40 million. Various numbers provided by UN officials to Ukrainian govt officials have at various times put Ukrainian population (in govt controlled areas) at 35 million [1], 32 million [2], 22-25 million [3]. This with adult men being actively blocked from leaving Ukraine.
I work for a Ukrainian product firm and interviewed around 50 people in the last quarter for in-office work. Some of them are migrants discouraged by european salaries where an entry-level IT professional can make as much as a waiter.
oh you can if you are younger than 23 and not in education. this exception initially started as "academic mobility" program - you had to somehow prove your intent to study before going abroad, I don't remember how - but then both govt and citizens realized that it's too much paperwork and impossible to organize properly, so the exception was generalized.
yeah, hating papers is our national trait at this point, given Diia and stuff XD
Why would "right now" matter if the war has been ongoing for 4.5 years? I live in Germany, many ukrainians moved here, had several coworkers and their families move.
If we’re imagining what should happen, maybe imagine no war at all. Until then, practical reality matters more than class resentment, however justified.
The talent has left but have you seen mass protests against Russian aggression in EU/US by those who left? I haven’t. And this is a big difference to the behaviour or Belarusians who fled - they are often seen across EU protesting against Lukashenko.
So the talent has left, but not because they disagree with Putin actions.
And do most Americans who leave the US condemn American soldiers for murdering a million Iraqis and continuing to colonize their country? At a certain point just not engaging in these pointless wars should be enough.
> On the first anniversary of the invasion, rallies took place in the main cities where Russian exiles settled, including Tbilisi, Vilnius, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and London, with turnout in the hundreds. In Yerevan, protesters burned a picture of Putin.
> In November 2024, at least a thousand people marched through central Berlin behind Navalnaya, Yashin and Kara-Murza, with parallel rallies in cities including Prague, Vilnius, Yerevan, Lisbon and San Francisco.
> Another Berlin march followed in 2025, after the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion.
And not just EU/US but moreso in other countries, where the migration wave was much bigger, eg Georgia and Armenia; after those protests many Russians were banned from entering Georgia after a visa run, yet others continued protesting anyway. Just google it for christ sake?
Also to me, as a Russian immigrant, protesting from another country doesn't make a lot of sense.
Anyway, at this point your comments in this thread are pure ragebait and not worth spending time replying to.
Thank you. Getting out is one of the strongest forms of protest. At the same time, you likely still have family there and that alone would be a good reason to be careful. Even so, there are plenty of Russians abroad that still carry water for putin and those are despicable, more so because they clearly have access to all the information they could want and from their comfy new lives they call for more suffering for others.
Are you kidding? E.g. in Berlin there are major protests every couple of months. They are not destructive (why would we destroy Germany‘s infra and police?), so maybe you do not hear about them as much. But they are quite numerous and regular. Ideally they should be in Russia AND destructive, but most normal people fled, yes.
> have you seen mass protests against Russian aggression in EU/US by those who left?
What are you talking about? Just look at the amount of humanitarian visas getting by Russians. We like literally talking about hundreds per country on average (not hundreds of thousands, HUNDREDS). So participation in mass protests is like the fastest way to be deported back in Russia and get 8 years in jail.
I know a couple of people who do that, but unless you settled in a really cheap country (for Russians that would likely be Armenia or Kazakhstan), you would really struggle to make ends meet with a Russian salary. And IT-folks who are used to luxury in Russia do not like that :)
Also in countries with structured laws for social security, residence permits, pensions etc., you will most likely be caught for doing shady things (not paying local taxes or not paying social contributions). And if you do pay them, you are even more financially screwed. E.g. in Germany an employed person who is not supported by a local employer in paying social security would give away well over a half of their salary. So… either you REALLY live a shady life / life in a “developing” country with no tax control or you have to integrate and find a local / unsanctioned job. Maybe not right away, but it has been >4 years, most people have done this already. There are really little incentives to stay employed in Russia. Of course, there are companies who moved themselves (ex-Yandex parts, Jetbrains, etc). But they are now registered / taxed / employing elsewhere. Even if operating partially in Russian language.
Czechia, quite surprisingly. But that was some time ago now, there are probably more these days (and might have been even then, I think my source is a Yandex speaker at a conference)
Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.
There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.
Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.
Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.
The majority of people don’t really care about the world, their country, etc.
They just care that they have what they need, that they don’t struggle too much in life.
In the US people will vote for whoever will make their life easier. To some degree there is morality/ethics/ideology but that’s usually grounded in something that effects you day-to-day
Examples from republicans: Keep out the immigrants or you won’t have a job. You don’t want trans people in the bathroom with your kid. Democrats will raise taxes
From dems: republicans will take away your access to birth control/abortions, republicans will cut social programs, etc
Nobody _really_ cares about wars in Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, etc aside from it effecting them at home.
Let's hold this comment until after the mid-terms. The biggest thing Americans can do to stop Trump's war mongering would be at the ballot box. Protesting is one thing, but actively voting in people with power to stop POTUS would be the most direct action they can take.
Often, both are true. It's perfectly legitimate for anyone (Russian or otherwise) to have geo-political concerns (e.g. NATO expansion, Cuban missile crisis etc), but a Russian concerned about NATO expansion may also be very opposed to the extreme option of war as a solution.
War affects an ordinary Russian in very negative ways: the possibility of conscription (w/ risk of injury/death), complications for travel, sanctions on goods and services, and the economic opportunity cost (money wasted on war that could have gone to productive uses, plus reduced economic output due to drone strikes on yandex, wildberries, refineries).
Russia could fully integrate into EU/NATO if it really wanted.
That's just not compatible with ambitions of its corrupt leaders who want to be a root-level player, not "one of NATO countries". And I'm not sure how legitimate is prioritization of wants of corrupt leaders over well-being of your compatriots.
NATO is not something you can just apply to on a whim. The path for a membership was there: e.g. there were some joint exercises, etc. Obviously they also need political integration as well.
Russia actually have been a member of Council of Europe (PACE, etc.) since 1996 but it was expelled in 2022. If they had a good record in Council of Europe they could really go for NATO membership eventually.
Ok, about the path you describe: how can one join a military exercise without a prior green light for that? And speaking about the political integration: remember that Turkey is in nato, so it does not need more political integration than Russia had in early 2000th.
What happened is that nato realized that if Russia joins, it will loose the reason to exist (i.e. if the old enemy joins the alliance what is the need for such an alliance anymore?)
So nato bureaucrats understood that they will loose well-paying positions and rejected even initial talks.
I think you misunderstood me, Russia _was_ on a path towards NATO in 90s to mid-2000s. There was cooperation, joint exercises, etc.
E.g. from a conversation between Clinton and Putin in 2000:
> Clinton: I am serious about being ready to discuss NATO membership with Russia. I recognize that domestic considerations inside Russia will prevent this for now, but over time Russia should be a part of every organization that holds the civilized world together.
> Putin: But I'll let you know that when I was asked about possible membership for Russia in NATO, I supported the idea.
Regarding "reason to exist", there's always a concern about Middle-East, China, etc.
Funny enough that you remember it was as "Russia applied but was rejected" but from this talk it's clear Putin is much less interested in Russia joining NATO than Clinton.
> but many seem to think it's justified - different thing
Literally no one thinks that. Look at the last election in Russia.
There were like 10 pro-Putin pro-war parties and one pro-Putin maybe-we-a-lil-bit-try-to-stop-the-war joke party. And that last party was banned from participating because of copyright infringement (they used fonts from Microsoft).
imagine if Putin had said... we are slipping behind the west. They are threatening us. So... we'll double down on research & education. We'll outthink them. We'll shift our economy into an economy that thrives in the future.
Pretty much precisely what the US did during the Cold War. To do so, we had to outspend the Soviets, and by a LOT. But the world buying US treasury bonds was basically a credit card for us to finance the above things that result into the world’s strongest military.
Ordinary Russians think "yeah war sucks, I wish Ukraine surrenders so peace can be restored". I'm afraid only a tiny minority believes Russia needs to surrender.
There is a lot of discussion about veterans and moscovites saying otherwise, but I wonder how loud their collective voices are to the Kremlin. From the outside, I have a dim view of that.
When the pager attack happened, there was a implicity sentiment on focusing on the technical details and not focus on politics. But I didn't see the same sentiment when Iran ballistic missles did their job.
Does anyone really believe Russia will eventually just surrender and leave? I can’t imagine the rationale to believe that. When Putin leaves all indications are that the next leader will actually be much more hawkish. They will only leave if someone bombs them to death. Which is quite a dangerous thing to do. Ukraine is pushing the limits, and everyone knows it’s with the help of many EU countries. I wonder what it will take for Russia to reach desperate measures in this war.
Russia have been taking desperate measures for years. The only thing they haven’t done is use nukes, which Russia can’t use without consequences that vastly outweigh the benefits.
I see no reason why they can't agree on a truce: Russia haven't gained any meaningful ground for a while. A truce or even a peace treaty would be strictly beneficial to Russia.
Any outcome short of surrender of Ukraine is an enormous headache for Putin that will likely cost him and his system dearly. They simply cannot, or they will be dead. Why? Because a million of veterans coming back and telling the stories will ask this question: „Why?“ The „Nazis“ are still in Kiev, the NATO is coming, what we got is just thousands of kilometers of ruins, what for was that? The war keeps them busy, for now. The situation is worse for Ukraine than for Russia, so it may feel like they can go on and actually win.
The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that. What was the plan. And blaming the West (which won‘t be 100% justified) will not help. And he may feel that now he is applying good pressure too, with those drone strikes and knocked out refineries.
> The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that.
That is actually not true at all. People in Ukraine know that it is not about territory but about sovereignty.
The problem of giving up territory is that you will run out of it. The goal of Ukraine is to survive as an independent state, not to hold the ground.
Before the latest Russian election one of the parties opposed the war in Ukraine and was a bit too popular, so, well, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabloko :
Yabloko is the sole officially registered party to openly oppose the Russian war in Ukraine, openly calling "for peace and freedom". The party planned to partake in the 2026 Russian legislative election under their anti-war slogan.[29][30] However, in August 2026, the party was barred from running by the Supreme Court of Russia due to a lawsuit by Rodina.
Well, some decades ago if you were a school teacher, you were _asked_ to (1) vote "right" yourself (2) call all parents and ask them to vote "right". If you disobeyed, the school got problems and you got problems. Maybe not enough to make all people comply, but sufficient to get the right outcomes. Same goes for all government-funded workers.
Since then I think they simplified the system and just forge the results outright.
tl;dr Other parties are Putin-like, and if/when a genuine alternative emerges, Putin deals with them ruthlessly. Example: Navalny was the charismatic leader of a small but popular rival party with anti-corruption policies. He was initially delegitimised (not allowed to partake in the 2018 elections due to [likely fake] charges of embezzlement), then poisoned (nearly died), then imprisoned, and then killed while in prison.
Consider the terrifying message that sends to would-be political rivals...
From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to December 2025, 14,999 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 40,601 injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU).
> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
Where Russia was forced out of Ukraine they left behind mass civilian graves. Bodies found with hands tied behind their backs, shot in the back of the head.
Surrendering to Russia does not bring peace to Ukraine only more suffering.
1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Building any appreciable amount of compute capacity (on the scale of, let's say, a single large datacenter in northern VA) inside a mountain also becomes a huge heat rejection problem, since with the exception of the 0.00000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a SM fiber cable, 100% of the energy consumed is turned into heat.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
> You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
Yea, there was even that idea to launch 1000s of satellites into LEO on a reusable rocket system. Crazy. How did people fall for that? There's not even that many satellites in total today.
They already run liquid cooling loops - compute density is way beyond what could circulate through air. Adding more pipes is probably trivial on the scale of datacenter expenses
Liquid cooling loops don't solve the problem of needing to reject the heat to the atmosphere outside of the building. It just makes it more efficient to transport the heat. At the grossest possible definition, a datacenter of N megawatts on Y acres of land is going to emit the same amount of heat whether it's air cooled equipment or liquid is used to take the heat to the outdoor heat exchanging equipment. On the scale of any very large datacenter the heat exchanging equipment is visible from aerial photos (and from space), take a look at google maps for some of the largest hyperscalers for examples.
I assume that "liquid cooling loop" has an endpoint outside of the building which hosts hardware. In this case it's exactly same problem - just make pipes longer.
Do you need many acres of land to host a heat exchanger?
So how much does the bunker help if you can just drone the cooling systems on the surface? The the computers either cook themselves or have to do an emergency shutdown.
A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
Yes, but that's not where the volume is. A 'small' data center, even here in Europe has 100's of racks. There are of course many tiny ones but collectively they don't even add up to one single large Google or AWS DC. Those things will run in excess of 1 or even 2 GW.
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
There's some 200MW capacity (only 80MW is currently used or being built) data center in a mine near a fjord in Norway. The limiting factor for its capacity seems to be the capacity of the electricity net nearby (which you can just hit and the DC is useless). With how NIMBY Norwegians are there's no way it would ever get to a GW or more even if it might be both technically and economically feasible. That's just one project and can't be replicated anywhere else. It's just a massive advantage that above ground datacenters are relatively 'figured out' and similar everywhere.
Do you know if that 200MW figure is total power budget for the facility (including electricity used for cooling systems and other facilities-support systems), or up to 200MW of electronics loads generating heat? The latter would be something like 300 cabinets with 5-6kW heat each.
Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
Germans hid plane engine factories underground with old (not so efficient) diesel generators running 24/7. 80 years ago, so the tech was leaner.
Also they didn’t have issues with ventilation and even today if you don’t know where - you won’t see anything driving around.
That's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
Or when the same thing can be accomplished by putting nothing in a mine, but an approach as simple as having geographical diversity by paying for some 'normal' colo in Hillsboro, and more normal colo in northern VA on the other side of the continent, and duplicating your stuff between two facilities. Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
> Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
Huh? The ones I know of have plenty of connectivity. The real issue is your first, that people prefer to just put their stuff in two countries over paying premium for having their servers under ground.
Your definition of connectivity may not be the same as mine, I'm referring to the number of facilities based carriers and those who ride on top of them you can get at major sites in Hillsboro. Facilities with peeringdb pages that have tons of on net carriers. Is there even an underground bunker colo that's big enough to rate its own peeringdb facility page?
It might be possible to do on the cheap; underground mines get decommissioned from time to time and could be repurposed as a data centre.
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
The war in Ukraine had showed us that distributed power generation, like solar, and nuclear are most resilient. Nuclear because people do not dare striking the power plants.
That's probably not going to help much. Ukraine has been able to hit targets very far inland with drones. They are also rapidly making advances in ballistic missile development. FP-7 has a range of 200-300km, their new FP-9 will have a range of up to 855km and an accuracy of 20m. I know that Russia is (extremely) large, but with development going at this pace...
dunno, Moscow to Novosibirsk is around 1,800 miles straight-line distance.
The war would be probably over by the time Ukraine would have developed those capabilities.
Novosibirsk only has cheap cooling in the winter, in the summer months it is hot. Better to go somewhere like Sabetta where they have their LNG harbour.
You will need a cable to that location, that will eat significant share of the costs. Location in southern Siberia near some big hydro may work better, and connecting it will be easier to some existing trans-Siberian line.
Buried fiber, hard to attack. Fiber repeater shelters, easy to attack. Their locations are public information, and any non public are trivial to find, in my experience as a cybersecurity professional who seeks out infra vulnerabilities for reporting for fun. Public records, satellite imagery, all OSINT one can do from a workstation.
You could potentially bury them in the ground, assuming you don’t use a generator for backup power. To my knowledge, this is not done today except in urban areas where an underground vault is used for power and comms.
Easy to attack, fast to replace. Every attack requires some planning, a drone and time window. That means attack budget. Spending it on traffic lights does not make sense.
I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure
I don't have specific information about Yandex but don't forget how heavily involved Amazon were with things like: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/world/europe/ukraine-cybe... it wouldn't be a huge stretch to suggest that a lot of cloud hosting providers are neck deep in national security.
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
Those data centers participate hugely in generating of internet misinformation and propaganda that shapes deterioration of support in European populations. Those are valid military targets.
Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Ground to orbit antisat lasers are already plausibly something various militaries have.
Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.
I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.
Except that doing this at scale is currently still a pipe dream. Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
> For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
The problem of the $ per kg to launch huge radiators and "orbital datacenter" type stuff of satellites into space doesn't seem to be resolving itself any time soon. Even if we hand wave away and say that 5 years from now the starship will be such a spectacular success than it costs only $200 per kg to send stuff into space (drastically lower than what it costs now), it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
> it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
With the caveat that Libya, being located upon Earth, is affected by solar power not working at night or when it's cloudy, and is also subject to being in Libya, which is a country with bureaucrats that are going to subject anything built in the country to their laws.
So the "some day in the future" orbiting data centers proposed by a known fraudster will use an experimental-at-best radiator technology that has never been tested in flight yet? That tracks.
> Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
To merely destroy "space data centers", you need not have very advanced targeting technology nor space lasers or whatnot. Just launch a few things releasing little ball bearings or steel needles or something like that - and "poison" the entire orbit.
If all you seek is to destroy (how en-vogue...) then that's more than perfect; not just destroy what's there but also make sure that by virtue of what remains (debris) nothing will get re-built.
Well ... first, that needs a "gadget" suitable for creating an EMP - which is still higher-rate tech than a missile being able to just reach a few hundred miles
altitude and then "conventionally blow up into tiny pieces". And second ... as I said, as belligerant or terrorist, why would you not want to destroy / orbit-poison ? Why would it ever be a good idea to "destruction-less disable" space infrastructure?
The SpaceX stock is floating solely (and temporarily) on fairy dust, it will not have any impact on the stock what-so-ever.
As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.
SpaceX has a de facto monopoly on space now. And they are 10-20 years ahead of even China. No nation now has a response to Falcon 9 - sth SpaceX built over 10 years ago.
It will mean data-centers move to space and then Musk will use his space prowess to bring weapons into space, in collaboration with the US military, and deny/strong-arm/corrupt governments around the world to protect his treasure, including the US government. He'll have a robot army to back it up.
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
Data centres will not be moving to space. The physics and economics don't work.
It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)
As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.
He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.
> but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy
Different problem.
Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.
However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.
We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.
Everything is possible. Doesn't mean you should do it. You can also put datacenters on the sea floor in a nuclear submarine. That might be even easier.
> t's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.
If you solve your cooling problem in space by distributing 10000 servers across 100 orbits then you replace one engineering challenge with the next; good luck with the satellite-satellite optical crossbars, and even more with the time travel beam shapers to get the communication latency between the components of your "orbit-distributed data center" to-target.
(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)
Communication latency and bandwidth would present big issues for AI satellites used for training. But if they are inference-only, then the latency and bandwidth demands are much, much lower. Starlink already demonstrates the required parameters.
Indeed ... yet the servers for that already exist and are largely ground-based - "edge" compute of the large CDNs through which much of the internet's traffic flows anyway.
Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost.
If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.
Yandex is one of the most notoriously pro-western companies in Russia, actively supporting relocation attempts. They even removed Russian borders from their maps in 2022. Some people claim they do this day have intelligence sharing agreements with Ukraine.
Also, Yandex have a ban on any pro-russian ads and pro-military stuff (curiously so, not so much against drugs and crime).
Among other things, they actively lobbied for more internet censorship (because as major player they benefited from being white-listed and not affected by them).
People cheering in this thread do not realize that a lot of patriots in Russia will actually support full Yandex demolition.
It would not be a first time Ukraine did bite a hand that feeds them. It happened every time, including with western allies, see even western-covered scandals with weapons, leaked stuff, recent ongoing south korea scandal etc. If you would count all cases over the years, it would be in hundreds or even thousands.
It probably is incomprehensible to a western mind.
So three important data centers strategically chosen to be destroyed? As far as i know such an loss couldn't even Google compensate, let alone Yandex. This could severely impact their economy for months.
Anybody have an idea how this insanity can ever end? Seems Russia is willing to kill off a whole generation of young people. Will this just go on forever? Or will Ukraine run out of soldiers?
Everything in Russia depends on Yandex. The impact on both businesses and daily life is massive. You can’t order a taxi or food delivery in most parts of Russia now. Retail chains POS systems in stores and payment systems are down too. Russians on threads and Twitter are complaining they can’t even buy things in stores. Of course, Putin himself doesn’t understand the impact because he barely knows how to use a computer and never uses the Internet.
Lots of civilian government agencies also use Azure for government / AWS GovCloud data centers because they’re FedRAMP compliant. It’s not just the DoD.
i think you miss interpreted, they are poorly defended because they are civilian, meaning globally data centers are universally undefended from military action. meaning this sort of action can spiral out of control very fast. and would have major global economic adverse effects.
its also important to understand that government isnt non civilian, in this context its non military
The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.
Yandex is pretty good search engine. It has zero censorship. Just the raw internet. Sometimes it more than I've bargained for but as a user I'm happy the option exists.
The severity of the attacks on Russian borders have I believe still a limited effect on the course of the war, but I suppose it certainly won't hurt Ukraine's chances to in some form survive this war.
The real question is will the Russian government survive their disastrous war in some form? 50% of Russia's oil infrastructure and refining capacity has been taken out in the last six months. Do you think Russia will be able to survive that? Disruption of Russian critical infrastructure routes are getting worse by the day. In the border regions you can't even get a truck driver to agree to move a load for $10,000 across some of the highways of Russia that supply Crimea. Ukraine is doing more than just surviving. It is beating Russia.
> 50% of Russia's oil infrastructure and refining capacity has been taken out
No, it has been merely hit (usually once) and typically repaired in the span of a few days. The whole "double-digits percents have been destroyed" typically comes from not so high quality news agencies. Some things were destroyed more thoroughly, but their margin is largely negligible.
I think it entirely depends of what censorship you care about. If political censorship is irrelevant to you and puritanistic and copyright censorship is what's in you way then western search engines are more heavily censored.
Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)
Hey, it's you again :) I think that map features quite prominently on a wall in your home country somewhere with little red 'x' marks on a couple of places. May there soon be many more.
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
It also seems like a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. UA put logistics/distribution centers under threat (wildberries) and refineries under threat, so the Russians moved their scarce air defense resources around on the map in an attempt to cover those, but oops, that left little or nothing covering the yandex datacenters and similar. There's not enough to go around to cover all of the possible geographically distributed pain points in the economy.
I bet Slack channels in Nebius are on fire these days, but also they managed to make even more money.
Entire upper management and all key positions in Nebius are held by ex Yandex-es. I wonder what is going through their heads now
Plenty of the bots are real people, even if their behavior is hard to distinguish from bots. HN has lots of them so you can see it right here, just check for the green accounts made just for this thread alone to give you an idea how bad it is.
While I appreciate the sentiment, the decline of American/Western companies into modern Puritanism is nothing new - but considering the staunch conservatism of the average Russian, I’d say they would do the same thing if they could, they just don’t have the engineering capacity to do the same thing.
For people who are “worried” that Ukraine targets data centers: Ukraine did not start it.
For the entire September, Russia conducted 10+ strikes on all key telecom, and internet provider data centers in Ukraine.
Now it is just a return
One interesting fact I've heard recently (I live in Poland; we share a border with Ukraine as well as with a part of Russia).
Russia went all in on "digital sovereignty." This is partly because the Russian government cares deeply about censoring what their citizens can see (which they can't do if those citizens consume content from American services), partly because the American services themselves cut Russia off because of sanctions-related concerns.
This makes Russian datacenters a much more attractive target for the Ukrainians. While Russia can (and does) bomb Ukrainian datacenters, the fact that Ukrainians are so reliant on US infrastructure (and could rapidly move local workloads to western clouds if the need was great enough) makes such operations far less attractive. It's much easier for Ukraine to strike some facility near Moscow than it is for Russia to strike Ashburn, Virginia.
Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
I'd heard (from someone trying to use them) that net connections into the Chinese clouds was very busy in the days around the start of the war, so the suggestion is they have critical stuff mirrored there.
Correct. China has been instrumental in keeping russia supplied and online for the duration of this war.
It's also been instrumental in supplying Ukraine to the point they had to schedule Russian and Ukrainian delegations around each other in their factories when they were visiting at the same times. [0]
China is the only true winner of that war.
[0]: https://medium.com/@hayekesteloo/china-vs-ukraine-ft-investi...
That's precisely the problem. You can't credibly supply both sides in a war where one party clearly is the aggressor and pretend you are neutral. You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
I don't think they're pretending to be neutral. I'm not sure they even think in those categories at all. They'll happily sell as much equipment as they can manufacture for hard cash or barter it for grain, oil or gas as long as the war is going on. They'll start considering options once there's a clear winner on the battlefield.
They haven't forgotten Russias role for the century of humiliation either.
Russia is economically becoming a vassal state just like north Korea is.
I think this is why it's so important to figure out a path to returning Königsberg to western control before the war runs its course. If we assume that Russia is basically disassembled and parted out, it's looking increasingly certain that China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of those parts. For the most part this seems inevitable at this point, but there still seems to be a path to keep Königsberg as a western region; and an optimistic can imagine keeping St. Petersburg as well, but I don't see a path for forward action on that before Russia's collapse, and I don't really see how the west can act faster than China once the collapse begins.
China's behavior makes sense if they consider both Russia and Ukraine (the latter being a proxy for the west) to be enemies of some sort. Let your enemies fight each other and waste resources while you yourself profit.
The same can be said about the US <> EU/Russia in this conflict. Why bother helping Ukraine/Europe win the war if you consider them at least partly hostile? Better to let them fight your own enemy (Russia) and trade with both sides to your own advantage.
The US considers Europe to be hostile?
The current administration is not treating Europe as an ally. It’s pretty shameful.
But hopefully Europe becomes more independent. The US has become too unstable
You seen any of Trump's tweets in the last couple months? It used to be all about China but now he talks about Europe and Canada like we're enemies because he feels like the whole world should only do what he wants.
Have you met China? They have no pretenses about being neutral or ethical. For them it's just business.
> You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
Yes, and that helped turn the US into the global hegemony it is today. No wonder China wants a wack. Power doesn't need a conscience.
Ukraine can have servers outside of Ukraine. No meed to have servers in the USA. I dont think these issues are so connected. As long as the servers are somewhere Russia does not dare to bomb.
Even some pro-russian war bloggers are critical of Putin's decision to start striking data centers:
3/ "This summer, faced with the inability to conclude a war that began nearly five years ago, Putin opted for a new round of escalation.
4/ "In June, the Russian Armed Forces began systematically targeting warehouses belonging to the Ukrainian company Nova Poshta, prompting a retaliatory strike on Wildberries warehouses; in September, strikes on Ukrainian data centres began, and a response followed swiftly.
5/ "In other words, one shouldn't assume that no one had thought to attack data centres before; it is simply that Putin decided to take this step right now.
6/ "This move effectively lifted the constraints that had previously bound Ukraine – a country that generally adheres to certain rules of engagement and, with few exceptions, does not initiate attacks on clearly civilian targets.
7/ "Ukraine had been prepared for this scenario almost from the very start of the war – and even before that. Even prior to the invasion, when it was clear to everyone that it was virtually inevitable, a law was passed allowing for the temporary storage of state registries abroad.
...
47/ "The issue is therefore extremely serious — far more so than the strikes on Wildberries, which result in economic damage but do not threaten the functioning of the state itself.
48/ "I believe Putin may have committed his second-biggest blunder since the invasion of Ukraine. He has literally started throwing stones inside a glass house without realizing how fragile that house is. The very system he built prevents him from grasping this;…
49/ …he makes decisions without consulting or listening to anyone, living in his own cozy bubble.
https://bsky.app/profile/chriso-wiki.bsky.social/post/3mxgts...
My post was answering to this
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
The argument is Europe can decide to move servers out of USA and Ukraine is fine because Ukraine does not need servers in USA. They need servers in other countries. That was the logic issue with OP.
Your post is completely unrelated to mine or the above. Maybe wrong thread
I don't think it's unrelated, the text I quoted says Ukraine mirrored some of its critical data abroad, something russia decided against. I don't disagree with your post, I was just expanding a bit on it.
Not to mention dozens of civilians killed by Russian strikes just in the last few days, including many children...
Here's a playground hit this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfXCX_PMbA0
Yes, those sick psychopaths want to turn Kyiv and other major cities into uninhabitable deserts. They target bridges with regular cars in the middle of the day; attack buses, trains, residential buildings, gas stations, shopping malls, grocery stores, water and gas utilities. They declared a total war on Ukraine and removed all constraints on their methods.
Russia started *somewhat* bombing civilian dual-use infrastructure only after Ukraine started bombing random warehouses in Russia this summer.
It's hilarious how clueless people are in this thread, I guess it's only pro-ukraine bots and incompetent western warmongers.
Russia could've made whole Ukraine in a literal dead state long ago -- it only takes few rockets to permanently knock out nuclear power plants and water treatment plants. Yet they didn't. I wonder why.
For every Ukraine's attack Russia can slam back ten times as hard. So, I guess, previous escalations were futile. I guess after this day Russian retaliation dial will be advanced two-three degrees up.
It's because Russia doesn't want to take over a complete wasteland that will be unproductive for decades if Russia ends up absorbing all of Ukraine.
Not to mention a sudden ebb of bot traffic all over the world!
How did you measure that?
Well Trump did ask for less fuel targeting so he can give Putin handjobs I mean money so data centers seem like a good compromise!
If you want to help Ukraine, here is a list of the largest volunteer funds you can donate to:
Come Back Alive - delivered the first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation - bought the famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom - US-based foundation https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/
Canada-Ukraine Foundation - Canadian NGO, organizes winter aid for civilians https://www.cufoundation.ca/
Ukrainian World Congress https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Exen - Polish volunteer who delivers used vehicles to the front https://pomagam.pl/4x4dlaukrainy
United24 - the government fund https://u24.gov.ua/
Blue/Yellow - Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military https://blue-yellow.lt/en/
Stopify - Latvian initiative, donations collected via Ziedot.lv https://stopify.org.ua/
Weapons to Ukraine - Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en
Help99 - from Estonia's LIFT99 startup hub, convoys refitted trucks and drones to the front https://www.help99.co/donate
Aktion Deutschland Hilft - German humanitarian aid https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/
Thanks to everyone who suggested additions. Please keep adding foundations from your country in the comments.
I have done a lot of work with KOLO Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Including KOLO dispersing medical equipment that I donated, and I can vouch that they are effective and very efficient.
Blue Yellow - a Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military: https://blue-yellow.lt/en/ (you can specify the purpose for which you are donating, e.g. drones)
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
If in doubt - pick Come Back Alive. They have spotless reputation and invest into long-term projects such as military education and veteran sports/aid.
Yes, I think they are the best. They have strong expertise (for example they were commissioned to conduct studies by Ministry of Defense of Ukraine) and excellent accountability (some is public [0]).
In my eyes one of their highpoints which demonstrates their trustworthiness is the ~20 million dollars payment they received this year by undisclosed European (I think it was European) entity (government or private donors maybe)
[0] https://savelife.in.ua/en/reporting-en
I think Taras Chmut(head of Come Back Alive) mentioned that they got a ~20 million donation from the undisclosed European governments
Don't you want to target short term projects directly aimed at ending the russian threat first? Long term only matters if you make it there...
Come Back Alive was founded around 2014 and has operated continuously since. This is a conflict where long-term investments pay off. Also not saying they and others don't do short-term keep-up work - they do. But it's also important to develop education facilities and care for veterans.
That's what people at most other foundation thought in 2022, yet here we're in 2026, and the war is still going.
And to be fair not all Come back alive projects are long term, they provide cars, cables, laptops, portable power stations etc., but these do not engage public enough, so their media team focuses on more interesting projects.
What "long term" means is also differs, they put a lot of effort into their training centers, but now the training cycle of one person is several months (I assume, I don't know exact terms), which is not that long.
If I can add one, this Canadian NGO is also organizing winter aid efforts for Ukrainian civilians: https://www.cufoundation.ca/
And this group: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Thank you, updated
Thank you for posting this! I regularly donate through United24.
Also, Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en and 69th Sniffing Brigade https://www.help99.co/donate is doing awesome work.
Glory to the Heroes!
Stopify - https://stopify.org.ua/ A charity initiative created by a group of communication specialists and supporters of Ukraine. Legally the donations are collected by a well-known and experienced charity organization, Ziedot.lv, based in Riga, Latvia. All funds go towards purchasing necessary supplies for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, based on their requests to the Embassy of Ukraine in Latvia.
Humanitarian aid initiative in Germany: https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/de/hilfseinsaetze/no...
Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.
Yep, most of talent has left
Could you elaborate? What does this mean?
Edit: thanks for answers, this helps.
I am a top Russian CS degree alumna (HSE). I left Russia even before the war, but now most of my uni peers live and work abroad (US, EU, UK, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, etc.). It is similar for the alumni of the other top universities there. And we made the right choice, both ethically and financially/career-wise, imo.
> And we made the right choice, both ethically
FWIW, thank you for making this choice.
Big respect to each of you, its never easy to move away. Talk is cheap, 10x moreso on internet. Actions define a man / woman and their legacy and self worth.
Thank you.
There were several waves of Russians fleeing [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_...
(This is incomplete, I think there is a fourth or a fifth wave, probably since about summer 2026.)
To add a bit, the brain drain has been going on since at least the end of the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-wave_Russian_emigration
The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those most skilled left as soon as they could. Some of these, or their children, would go on to found startups.
> The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those [..]
.. were not Russians. USSR itself incorporated besides its native Russian talent 2 talent powerhouses of Ukraine and Armenia. Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse. Armenia was the USSR's silicon valley with hightest per capita of scientists in USSR. There is also Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to consider, all of them active in relative high tech engineering.
All of those also had some amount of brain drain around that time.
It means you shouldn't invade your neighbours and conscript your young people or you will ruin your economy.
To be fair the nerds aren't sent to the front lines they get to work in a drone unit.
This war won't be over until the Russian army starts conscription in Moscow. The Czar will happily empty out the villages in Siberia and the Caucasus.
Drone units of occupation forces of Russia are primary taegets for AFU and due limited control distance for FPVs, Russian drone units are serving at the zero line, actually. So they are sent to actual front lines constantly (despite what Russia officially claims)
They may or may not. I wouldn't like to take on this bet.
Most young people with a conscience (which is most people that like to read) leave to avoid conscription in an unjust war.
> Most young people with a conscience (which is most people that like to read) leave
No. I am sure that most young people with a conscience remaining. And it is mostly people without a conscience who leaving.
Russia is an extremely poor country, and literally governed by mafia. So generally it is impossible to leave Russia if you are not in top 10% by wealth, and it is almost impossible in Russia to get in those top 10% if you have conscience.
Drone units require good eyesight, reflexes, spatial orientation etc. FPS gamers are the best match, not coders.
I hope the MAGA folk threatening Canada take note.
They invaded the whole world already. I hope Canda be prepared for the worst
The plan for Canada is clearly to buy enough Quislings to force a secession vote.
TIL US gov is trying to make Alberta secede
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/30/are-trump-officials...
But it means exactly the opposite. For some reason everybody thinks that for people (or even for only one man) who make decisions, Russian economy, talented people, and datacenters has great value or something.
But the only thing that matters is to remain in power. And invading your neighbors country have get those people exactly that.
just neighbours?
> just neighbours?
Within the narrow scope of this discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
Just neighbours, otherwise people might draw awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations.
But then again, American soldiers are not dying in that war the way Russian do. That would be different in war against neighbhood nation where you cant hide purely behind technology.
> awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently. And I doubt you’ll find many on this forum defending even the latter.
Only if you know nothing about it - then it is all the same.
It’s reasonably close to the economic murder/suicide the US has caused with its rubbish crack at Iran
dont forget afghanistan, Iran Libya, Syria, etc etc. -_- none of these countries is doing well after their "liberation" or after their 'terrorists got bombed' or whatever wording (killed like dogs?) the current leader will have for it.
> dont forget afghanistan, Iran Libya, Syria
Out of these four, at least Syria is better off. Everything, literally everything is better than what the Assad regime was. The gruesomeness of Assad and his regime is on a level not seen since 1945.
Afghanistan was an utter failure of all of Western societies. Yes, we provided a generation worth of women with access to schools. But we never provided a way for Afghanistan as a country to stand on its own feet, instead we looked away while one half of the military didn't exist on paper and the other half raped children for funsies (look up "bacha bazi").
Libya... now that is mostly upon us Europeans. Ghaddafi, I'm glad this prick is gone, but again we didn't do anything to meaningfully help Libya grow, and by the time Putin began supporting oppositional warlords, the game was lost.
And Iran... oh dear god what a mess, dating back to the history of the US using Kurds for their aims and then letting them to die without support. This entire shitshow was a disaster from start to finish, even if the idea was noble - the Mullahs slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors the start of this year, it would have been incredibly unethical to just stand aside again.
Feeling if Syria is better off really depends on what sect you are in. But the unhappy groups are being killed iff. Soon only the happy groups will remain.
> even if the idea was noble
The idea of nobly saving people is just “think of the children” on the nation-state level. It sounds great but gets used for every politician’s own ends.
> The idea of nobly saving people is just “think of the children” on the nation-state level. It sounds great but gets used for every politician’s own ends.
Well, there's the saying every nerd should know, "with great power comes great responsibility". We have to be caretakers of those who cannot defend themselves, but all we care about is making money, and that ruins the mission from the start.
Casualty count for entire Vietnam campaign for US is like two weeks at the current burndown rate for r-sia
Why are people avoiding spelling "Russia"?
I was in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan not too long ago (both countries just to the south of Russia, for those not savvy of geography). Met plenty of young russians who moved there recently. I didn't have to ask why. Many of them used to work in the tech sector, it's easy for them to find new work.
A lot of people who could get out of Russia after the war started, did get out.
Majority has come back though after realization that the West does not really welcome Russians with open arms.
Wtf… definitely not. Russian shill account exposed.
Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.
> this applies also to Ukraine
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
[1] https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/gradual-market-stabilization-wh...
> It certainly does not.
Ukraine's estimated population in 2022 was around 40 million. Various numbers provided by UN officials to Ukrainian govt officials have at various times put Ukrainian population (in govt controlled areas) at 35 million [1], 32 million [2], 22-25 million [3]. This with adult men being actively blocked from leaving Ukraine.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-russia-war-ukrainian-po... [2] https://kyivindependent.com/200-000-500-000-men-could-leave-... [3] https://www.novinite.com/articles/238511/The+Uncomfortable+T...
Many Ukrainians ( including men) are living in Europe.
I work for a Ukrainian product firm and interviewed around 50 people in the last quarter for in-office work. Some of them are migrants discouraged by european salaries where an entry-level IT professional can make as much as a waiter.
You can't really leave Ukraine (legally*) right now if you are in the conscriptable demographics (M 18-60), unless you have good reasons.
oh you can if you are younger than 23 and not in education. this exception initially started as "academic mobility" program - you had to somehow prove your intent to study before going abroad, I don't remember how - but then both govt and citizens realized that it's too much paperwork and impossible to organize properly, so the exception was generalized.
yeah, hating papers is our national trait at this point, given Diia and stuff XD
Why would "right now" matter if the war has been ongoing for 4.5 years? I live in Germany, many ukrainians moved here, had several coworkers and their families move.
Just after they gave nepo babies below age 26 enough time to leave the country.
Having spoiled nepo babies on the front lines might be good in principle but probably more trouble than it’s worth in practice.
This war should be fought on all sides between oligarchs and their nepo babies exclusively.
If we’re imagining what should happen, maybe imagine no war at all. Until then, practical reality matters more than class resentment, however justified.
That anyone with a few brain cells and enough rubels has left the country
Ones who didn't are asking stupid questions...
Cyprus, Georgia, UAE
The talent has left but have you seen mass protests against Russian aggression in EU/US by those who left? I haven’t. And this is a big difference to the behaviour or Belarusians who fled - they are often seen across EU protesting against Lukashenko.
So the talent has left, but not because they disagree with Putin actions.
And do most Americans who leave the US condemn American soldiers for murdering a million Iraqis and continuing to colonize their country? At a certain point just not engaging in these pointless wars should be enough.
Most are probably too busy dissing the health care situation
I have?
> On the first anniversary of the invasion, rallies took place in the main cities where Russian exiles settled, including Tbilisi, Vilnius, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and London, with turnout in the hundreds. In Yerevan, protesters burned a picture of Putin.
> In November 2024, at least a thousand people marched through central Berlin behind Navalnaya, Yashin and Kara-Murza, with parallel rallies in cities including Prague, Vilnius, Yerevan, Lisbon and San Francisco.
> Another Berlin march followed in 2025, after the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion.
And not just EU/US but moreso in other countries, where the migration wave was much bigger, eg Georgia and Armenia; after those protests many Russians were banned from entering Georgia after a visa run, yet others continued protesting anyway. Just google it for christ sake?
Also to me, as a Russian immigrant, protesting from another country doesn't make a lot of sense.
Anyway, at this point your comments in this thread are pure ragebait and not worth spending time replying to.
> Also to me, as a Russian immigrant, protesting from another country doesn't make a lot of sense.
Thought the same.
Thank you. Getting out is one of the strongest forms of protest. At the same time, you likely still have family there and that alone would be a good reason to be careful. Even so, there are plenty of Russians abroad that still carry water for putin and those are despicable, more so because they clearly have access to all the information they could want and from their comfy new lives they call for more suffering for others.
Does the fear of being poisoned have an affect on Russian ex-pats from being very vocal?
Are you kidding? E.g. in Berlin there are major protests every couple of months. They are not destructive (why would we destroy Germany‘s infra and police?), so maybe you do not hear about them as much. But they are quite numerous and regular. Ideally they should be in Russia AND destructive, but most normal people fled, yes.
> have you seen mass protests against Russian aggression in EU/US by those who left?
What are you talking about? Just look at the amount of humanitarian visas getting by Russians. We like literally talking about hundreds per country on average (not hundreds of thousands, HUNDREDS). So participation in mass protests is like the fastest way to be deported back in Russia and get 8 years in jail.
Among them also Dan Abramov I think.
Yeah but I assume vast majority simply works from remote for the same companies they did?
I know a couple of people who do that, but unless you settled in a really cheap country (for Russians that would likely be Armenia or Kazakhstan), you would really struggle to make ends meet with a Russian salary. And IT-folks who are used to luxury in Russia do not like that :) Also in countries with structured laws for social security, residence permits, pensions etc., you will most likely be caught for doing shady things (not paying local taxes or not paying social contributions). And if you do pay them, you are even more financially screwed. E.g. in Germany an employed person who is not supported by a local employer in paying social security would give away well over a half of their salary. So… either you REALLY live a shady life / life in a “developing” country with no tax control or you have to integrate and find a local / unsanctioned job. Maybe not right away, but it has been >4 years, most people have done this already. There are really little incentives to stay employed in Russia. Of course, there are companies who moved themselves (ex-Yandex parts, Jetbrains, etc). But they are now registered / taxed / employing elsewhere. Even if operating partially in Russian language.
Russian payment systems are barely supported in the other world, so its kinda hard to work remotely and get paid in roubles
Fair point, but there are loopholes and IT people know how to use them. There was a YT video on the subject, iirc.
Out of curiosity, which was the 4th nation besides the US and China?
Czechia, quite surprisingly. But that was some time ago now, there are probably more these days (and might have been even then, I think my source is a Yandex speaker at a conference)
I guess it's France with its Qwant engine. decent for coding and French (culture, language, or both) queries. didn't use it for much else tho
>> Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology
it really never was. apart from a few one-off examples they have nothing if interest and quality.
Yandex, Kaspersky, Telegram, Intellij (including Kotlin), Nginx, VK to name a few. All those are coming from Russia.
yes they can clone western companies.
very valuable, very high tech.
for nginx/intelij - you can find a few good examples in any country on earth.
does not make the country good in tech.
Yandex precedes Google.
Yandex is now Nebius. It's a lot in the news with AI.
The Yandex that stayed in Russia is a ghost of the past.
Great! More news like this
Maybe this would remind ordinary russians that killing innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good
> remind ordinary Russians
Ordinary Russians think the war's bad too. Only difference is you and I can say that without getting 15 years in a (very harsh) prison.
I'm not totally sure about that.
Maybe Russians outside Russia.
Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.
There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.
Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.
Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.
It's like Americans thinking thar what their president is doing is right. Nobody in there is doing anything to stop it.
The majority of people don’t really care about the world, their country, etc.
They just care that they have what they need, that they don’t struggle too much in life.
In the US people will vote for whoever will make their life easier. To some degree there is morality/ethics/ideology but that’s usually grounded in something that effects you day-to-day
Examples from republicans: Keep out the immigrants or you won’t have a job. You don’t want trans people in the bathroom with your kid. Democrats will raise taxes
From dems: republicans will take away your access to birth control/abortions, republicans will cut social programs, etc
Nobody _really_ cares about wars in Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, etc aside from it effecting them at home.
Let's hold this comment until after the mid-terms. The biggest thing Americans can do to stop Trump's war mongering would be at the ballot box. Protesting is one thing, but actively voting in people with power to stop POTUS would be the most direct action they can take.
Often, both are true. It's perfectly legitimate for anyone (Russian or otherwise) to have geo-political concerns (e.g. NATO expansion, Cuban missile crisis etc), but a Russian concerned about NATO expansion may also be very opposed to the extreme option of war as a solution.
War affects an ordinary Russian in very negative ways: the possibility of conscription (w/ risk of injury/death), complications for travel, sanctions on goods and services, and the economic opportunity cost (money wasted on war that could have gone to productive uses, plus reduced economic output due to drone strikes on yandex, wildberries, refineries).
Russia could fully integrate into EU/NATO if it really wanted.
That's just not compatible with ambitions of its corrupt leaders who want to be a root-level player, not "one of NATO countries". And I'm not sure how legitimate is prioritization of wants of corrupt leaders over well-being of your compatriots.
Unsurprisingly, the same motivates the current crop of leadership in the US. They stopped teaching history in school I guess.
They have asked to be a part of nato twice around 2000th and were both times rejected.
NATO is not something you can just apply to on a whim. The path for a membership was there: e.g. there were some joint exercises, etc. Obviously they also need political integration as well.
Russia actually have been a member of Council of Europe (PACE, etc.) since 1996 but it was expelled in 2022. If they had a good record in Council of Europe they could really go for NATO membership eventually.
Ok, about the path you describe: how can one join a military exercise without a prior green light for that? And speaking about the political integration: remember that Turkey is in nato, so it does not need more political integration than Russia had in early 2000th.
What happened is that nato realized that if Russia joins, it will loose the reason to exist (i.e. if the old enemy joins the alliance what is the need for such an alliance anymore?)
So nato bureaucrats understood that they will loose well-paying positions and rejected even initial talks.
I think you misunderstood me, Russia _was_ on a path towards NATO in 90s to mid-2000s. There was cooperation, joint exercises, etc.
E.g. from a conversation between Clinton and Putin in 2000:
> Clinton: I am serious about being ready to discuss NATO membership with Russia. I recognize that domestic considerations inside Russia will prevent this for now, but over time Russia should be a part of every organization that holds the civilized world together.
> Putin: But I'll let you know that when I was asked about possible membership for Russia in NATO, I supported the idea.
Regarding "reason to exist", there's always a concern about Middle-East, China, etc.
Funny enough that you remember it was as "Russia applied but was rejected" but from this talk it's clear Putin is much less interested in Russia joining NATO than Clinton.
You can find full text here: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/33393-document-3-memorand...
> but many seem to think it's justified - different thing
Literally no one thinks that. Look at the last election in Russia.
There were like 10 pro-Putin pro-war parties and one pro-Putin maybe-we-a-lil-bit-try-to-stop-the-war joke party. And that last party was banned from participating because of copyright infringement (they used fonts from Microsoft).
imagine if Putin had said... we are slipping behind the west. They are threatening us. So... we'll double down on research & education. We'll outthink them. We'll shift our economy into an economy that thrives in the future.
Pretty much precisely what the US did during the Cold War. To do so, we had to outspend the Soviets, and by a LOT. But the world buying US treasury bonds was basically a credit card for us to finance the above things that result into the world’s strongest military.
Ordinary Russians think "yeah war sucks, I wish Ukraine surrenders so peace can be restored". I'm afraid only a tiny minority believes Russia needs to surrender.
It’s worth pointing out that Russia doesn’t need to “surrender” to stop the war. It just needs to withdraw.
That’s not surrender because Russia started this invasion without provocation. It wasn’t under attack and Ukraine hadn’t joined NATO.
Russia had no reason to invade except as a show of force.
If Putin suddenly declared he’d met his objectives and withdrew who’s to say otherwise?
> who’s to say otherwise?
There is a lot of discussion about veterans and moscovites saying otherwise, but I wonder how loud their collective voices are to the Kremlin. From the outside, I have a dim view of that.
When the pager attack happened, there was a implicity sentiment on focusing on the technical details and not focus on politics. But I didn't see the same sentiment when Iran ballistic missles did their job.
Irans BMs primarily targeted cities, the pager attacks resulted in a lot less civilian casualties
Does anyone really believe Russia will eventually just surrender and leave? I can’t imagine the rationale to believe that. When Putin leaves all indications are that the next leader will actually be much more hawkish. They will only leave if someone bombs them to death. Which is quite a dangerous thing to do. Ukraine is pushing the limits, and everyone knows it’s with the help of many EU countries. I wonder what it will take for Russia to reach desperate measures in this war.
Russia have been taking desperate measures for years. The only thing they haven’t done is use nukes, which Russia can’t use without consequences that vastly outweigh the benefits.
They left Afghanistan. Also, Imdon’t see Ukraine giving up any time soon either.
I see no reason why they can't agree on a truce: Russia haven't gained any meaningful ground for a while. A truce or even a peace treaty would be strictly beneficial to Russia.
Any outcome short of surrender of Ukraine is an enormous headache for Putin that will likely cost him and his system dearly. They simply cannot, or they will be dead. Why? Because a million of veterans coming back and telling the stories will ask this question: „Why?“ The „Nazis“ are still in Kiev, the NATO is coming, what we got is just thousands of kilometers of ruins, what for was that? The war keeps them busy, for now. The situation is worse for Ukraine than for Russia, so it may feel like they can go on and actually win.
The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that. What was the plan. And blaming the West (which won‘t be 100% justified) will not help. And he may feel that now he is applying good pressure too, with those drone strikes and knocked out refineries.
> The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that.
That is actually not true at all. People in Ukraine know that it is not about territory but about sovereignty.
The problem of giving up territory is that you will run out of it. The goal of Ukraine is to survive as an independent state, not to hold the ground.
For the time being.
Are they physically forced to vote for Putin? And how widespread is the electoral fraud?
Before the latest Russian election one of the parties opposed the war in Ukraine and was a bit too popular, so, well, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabloko :
Also, several politicians associated with it were imprisoned, e.g. this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_ShlosbergWell, some decades ago if you were a school teacher, you were _asked_ to (1) vote "right" yourself (2) call all parents and ask them to vote "right". If you disobeyed, the school got problems and you got problems. Maybe not enough to make all people comply, but sufficient to get the right outcomes. Same goes for all government-funded workers.
Since then I think they simplified the system and just forge the results outright.
This is informative https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/27658/25206
tl;dr Other parties are Putin-like, and if/when a genuine alternative emerges, Putin deals with them ruthlessly. Example: Navalny was the charismatic leader of a small but popular rival party with anti-corruption policies. He was initially delegitimised (not allowed to partake in the 2018 elections due to [likely fake] charges of embezzlement), then poisoned (nearly died), then imprisoned, and then killed while in prison.
Consider the terrifying message that sends to would-be political rivals...
40.000 - 100.000 dead civilians.
Estimate range is big because lots of civilians died in cities that ended up occupied.
What is this number referring to? When I google it I only find chechen war, gaza, and US gun deaths annually
Mariupol's civilian casualties are hard to establish. Some of the upper estimates [1] run to 100,000 killed. Over just a couple of months.
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/10/06/i-m-used-to-walking-...
The number is referring to the post I replied to:
"innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good".
Estimations for how many civilians Russians killed in Chechnya range from 45,000 to 80,000.
They were asking for a reference/source, not to be treated like an idiot.
"What is this number referring to?"
Does not sound like looking for a source, but I'm not a native speaker.
I am. You are correct.
I suppose they’re mixing up deaths with injuries
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/ukrai...> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
I’m not able to find this citation in the human rights watch link you reply to, nor elsewhere on this page nor the Yandex page.
Are we looking at the same thing? Was it deleted somewhere?
i mean, presumably so could ukraine?
Yes, capitulate to the attacker. Cease to exist as a country, nation, people, culture. Presumably that is an option!
If Ukraine ceased military activity, why do you think Russia wouldn't continue their invasion?
Where Russia was forced out of Ukraine they left behind mass civilian graves. Bodies found with hands tied behind their backs, shot in the back of the head.
Surrendering to Russia does not bring peace to Ukraine only more suffering.
They have to fight on, Russia does not.
How could Ukraine stop the Russian invasion?
Ukraine can stop the war at any time by committing mass suicide. They're just being selfish.
and be overrun by soldiers who kill civilians with drones, rape and pillage? No thanks
1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
It's likely much higher considering the completely destroyed cities and towns. E.g. Mariupol had a population of 450 000 before the war.
Much more. It was around 60k in Mariupol alone.
Also helps with removing bots from X (to much of Elon's disagreement)
I remember that during the Wagner rebellion there was a 24h-48h time frame of no Russian bot activities. Was kinda surreal.
Prigozhin was one of Putin's chief botmasters. He helped set up the Internet Research Agency, which was one of Russia's biggest troll farms.
Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Scaleway built one of their Paris AZs in a nuclear fallout shelter: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/meet-fr-par-3/
Datacenters are full of valuable computers and related equipment, but building the equivalent space under a mountain will cost a crazy amount.
Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.
Building any appreciable amount of compute capacity (on the scale of, let's say, a single large datacenter in northern VA) inside a mountain also becomes a huge heat rejection problem, since with the exception of the 0.00000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a SM fiber cable, 100% of the energy consumed is turned into heat.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
> You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
It's like the Hyperloop all over again.
Musk comes up with a crazy idea.
Investors, "analysts" and sycophants go to great lengths to defend it.
Rational people wonder if everyone is losing their mind.
Musk profits.
Yea, there was even that idea to launch 1000s of satellites into LEO on a reusable rocket system. Crazy. How did people fall for that? There's not even that many satellites in total today.
Iron Mountain does it but they used an existing limestone mine with a large water reservoir [1][2]
Edit: I guess the scale isn't comparable to a, for example, Google data center though.
[1] https://www.ironmountain.com/data-centers/colocation/our-dat...
[2] https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-pr...
They already run liquid cooling loops - compute density is way beyond what could circulate through air. Adding more pipes is probably trivial on the scale of datacenter expenses
Liquid cooling loops don't solve the problem of needing to reject the heat to the atmosphere outside of the building. It just makes it more efficient to transport the heat. At the grossest possible definition, a datacenter of N megawatts on Y acres of land is going to emit the same amount of heat whether it's air cooled equipment or liquid is used to take the heat to the outdoor heat exchanging equipment. On the scale of any very large datacenter the heat exchanging equipment is visible from aerial photos (and from space), take a look at google maps for some of the largest hyperscalers for examples.
I assume that "liquid cooling loop" has an endpoint outside of the building which hosts hardware. In this case it's exactly same problem - just make pipes longer.
Do you need many acres of land to host a heat exchanger?
So how much does the bunker help if you can just drone the cooling systems on the surface? The the computers either cook themselves or have to do an emergency shutdown.
It can help to preserve all data and compute. Once cooling can be re-established, you just continue.
So they want to build it in space. Trade one heat problem for another, but put it completely out of range (for most attackers).
Yeah, but which attackers do we have to worry about nowadays?
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russian-satel...
Pionen in sweden is a datacenter in a bunker. The Pirate Bay used to be hosted there.
A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
Pionen is small but it is quite a bit bigger than "a couple of dozen racks". More like 100-200 if I recall correctly.
By 1990's standards that was small. Today it is tiny.
In the US the most common deployed size is below 5MW?
Dont know why i can't reply to the person commenting below. But where's the statistics? Who has these datacenters out in the field?
Yes, but that's not where the volume is. A 'small' data center, even here in Europe has 100's of racks. There are of course many tiny ones but collectively they don't even add up to one single large Google or AWS DC. Those things will run in excess of 1 or even 2 GW.
According to their site, Pionen has 1.5MW of cooling capacity https://swedendedicated.com/datacenter/
neat. why can't you put the heat in the mountain?
For broadly the same reason that many years of heat from braking has heat-saturated the london underground.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=london+un...
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
Commodity hardware may be disposable, but data that is not reproducible is worth it. I suspect most storage will move to secure environments.
The bunkers are already out there e.g. limestone mines in US, Italy,
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...
Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
There's some 200MW capacity (only 80MW is currently used or being built) data center in a mine near a fjord in Norway. The limiting factor for its capacity seems to be the capacity of the electricity net nearby (which you can just hit and the DC is useless). With how NIMBY Norwegians are there's no way it would ever get to a GW or more even if it might be both technically and economically feasible. That's just one project and can't be replicated anywhere else. It's just a massive advantage that above ground datacenters are relatively 'figured out' and similar everywhere.
edit: 61.9340107, 5.5084207 are the coordinates
Do you know if that 200MW figure is total power budget for the facility (including electricity used for cooling systems and other facilities-support systems), or up to 200MW of electronics loads generating heat? The latter would be something like 300 cabinets with 5-6kW heat each.
Apparently it's for the whole facility, they have a power usage effectiveness of around 1.1 so 175-180MW of electronics.
https://new.abb.com/news/detail/5924/abb-solutions-power-eur...
Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
Germans hid plane engine factories underground with old (not so efficient) diesel generators running 24/7. 80 years ago, so the tech was leaner. Also they didn’t have issues with ventilation and even today if you don’t know where - you won’t see anything driving around.
That's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
Or when the same thing can be accomplished by putting nothing in a mine, but an approach as simple as having geographical diversity by paying for some 'normal' colo in Hillsboro, and more normal colo in northern VA on the other side of the continent, and duplicating your stuff between two facilities. Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
> Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
Huh? The ones I know of have plenty of connectivity. The real issue is your first, that people prefer to just put their stuff in two countries over paying premium for having their servers under ground.
Your definition of connectivity may not be the same as mine, I'm referring to the number of facilities based carriers and those who ride on top of them you can get at major sites in Hillsboro. Facilities with peeringdb pages that have tons of on net carriers. Is there even an underground bunker colo that's big enough to rate its own peeringdb facility page?
It might be possible to do on the cheap; underground mines get decommissioned from time to time and could be repurposed as a data centre.
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
The war in Ukraine had showed us that distributed power generation, like solar, and nuclear are most resilient. Nuclear because people do not dare striking the power plants.
With AI there is little data in datacenters - the only thing you lose is % compute.
Datacenters are not only "data"
In bunkers, IDK. In places far away from conflict or conflictive nations, a lot.
They will probably start building DCs in Siberia. Cheap cooling!
That's probably not going to help much. Ukraine has been able to hit targets very far inland with drones. They are also rapidly making advances in ballistic missile development. FP-7 has a range of 200-300km, their new FP-9 will have a range of up to 855km and an accuracy of 20m. I know that Russia is (extremely) large, but with development going at this pace...
Ukraine are hitting targets 2,500km away
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-hits-russia...
dunno, Moscow to Novosibirsk is around 1,800 miles straight-line distance. The war would be probably over by the time Ukraine would have developed those capabilities.
Novosibirsk only has cheap cooling in the winter, in the summer months it is hot. Better to go somewhere like Sabetta where they have their LNG harbour.
You will need a cable to that location, that will eat significant share of the costs. Location in southern Siberia near some big hydro may work better, and connecting it will be easier to some existing trans-Siberian line.
I don't think it's a great plan for many reasons, the permafrost would make it cost a fortune.
Power and data has to come from somewhere for those bunkers. Every fiber hut and power substation becomes a target. Can they all be protected? No.
Fibers? Yes, they are easy to protect. The hard part is power generation.
Buried fiber, hard to attack. Fiber repeater shelters, easy to attack. Their locations are public information, and any non public are trivial to find, in my experience as a cybersecurity professional who seeks out infra vulnerabilities for reporting for fun. Public records, satellite imagery, all OSINT one can do from a workstation.
You could potentially bury them in the ground, assuming you don’t use a generator for backup power. To my knowledge, this is not done today except in urban areas where an underground vault is used for power and comms.
https://www.decommsystems.com/resources/what-goes-into-an-il...
Easy to attack, fast to replace. Every attack requires some planning, a drone and time window. That means attack budget. Spending it on traffic lights does not make sense.
You are also forgetting the undersea cables.
I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure
Military personnel use the same Yandex services as regular people: delivery, maps, taxi, etc.
Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.
Also Russia has been targeting Ukrainian digital infrastructure so they make these things fair game IMO.
Russia is hitting everything in Ukraine… DC, power plants, rail, road housing
Ukraine has a very targeted response but notably tries to minimise civilian casualties
I don't have specific information about Yandex but don't forget how heavily involved Amazon were with things like: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/world/europe/ukraine-cybe... it wouldn't be a huge stretch to suggest that a lot of cloud hosting providers are neck deep in national security.
This is a... mischaracterization.
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
Those data centers participate hugely in generating of internet misinformation and propaganda that shapes deterioration of support in European populations. Those are valid military targets.
Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Until someone blows up a satellite and creates enough shrapnel that every other satellite is destroyed.
Ground to orbit antisat lasers are already plausibly something various militaries have.
Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.
I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.
Except that doing this at scale is currently still a pipe dream. Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...
> For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
Are you asserting that we must use the exact same heat rejection architecture the ISS uses for data centers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
The problem of the $ per kg to launch huge radiators and "orbital datacenter" type stuff of satellites into space doesn't seem to be resolving itself any time soon. Even if we hand wave away and say that 5 years from now the starship will be such a spectacular success than it costs only $200 per kg to send stuff into space (drastically lower than what it costs now), it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
> it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
With the caveat that Libya, being located upon Earth, is affected by solar power not working at night or when it's cloudy, and is also subject to being in Libya, which is a country with bureaucrats that are going to subject anything built in the country to their laws.
So the "some day in the future" orbiting data centers proposed by a known fraudster will use an experimental-at-best radiator technology that has never been tested in flight yet? That tracks.
Orbital data center constellations are also studied by Google, the idea is not just from Elon.
> Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
> Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
Or will we see civilian datacenters with their own defensive drone swarms, and a couple of phalanx-style point defence systems for good measure?
No, just more underground construction
And sky rocketing (...) prices
It would be cheaper for most businesses to just go on prem again.
RTO also for the servers?
This should have a material impact on SpaceX stock. Wouldn't it be much easier to harden datacenters against attack under ground than in space?
To merely destroy "space data centers", you need not have very advanced targeting technology nor space lasers or whatnot. Just launch a few things releasing little ball bearings or steel needles or something like that - and "poison" the entire orbit.
If all you seek is to destroy (how en-vogue...) then that's more than perfect; not just destroy what's there but also make sure that by virtue of what remains (debris) nothing will get re-built.
A single EMP would be enough without causing excessive space debris. It's not like someone will simply fly in and swap some hardware.
Well ... first, that needs a "gadget" suitable for creating an EMP - which is still higher-rate tech than a missile being able to just reach a few hundred miles altitude and then "conventionally blow up into tiny pieces". And second ... as I said, as belligerant or terrorist, why would you not want to destroy / orbit-poison ? Why would it ever be a good idea to "destruction-less disable" space infrastructure?
The SpaceX stock is floating solely (and temporarily) on fairy dust, it will not have any impact on the stock what-so-ever.
As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.
SpaceX has a de facto monopoly on space now. And they are 10-20 years ahead of even China. No nation now has a response to Falcon 9 - sth SpaceX built over 10 years ago.
It will mean data-centers move to space and then Musk will use his space prowess to bring weapons into space, in collaboration with the US military, and deny/strong-arm/corrupt governments around the world to protect his treasure, including the US government. He'll have a robot army to back it up.
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
Data centres will not be moving to space. The physics and economics don't work.
It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)
As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.
He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.
> but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy
Different problem.
Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.
However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.
We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.
Everything is possible. Doesn't mean you should do it. You can also put datacenters on the sea floor in a nuclear submarine. That might be even easier.
But does it make sense to do it?
No.
> t's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.
If you solve your cooling problem in space by distributing 10000 servers across 100 orbits then you replace one engineering challenge with the next; good luck with the satellite-satellite optical crossbars, and even more with the time travel beam shapers to get the communication latency between the components of your "orbit-distributed data center" to-target.
(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)
Communication latency and bandwidth would present big issues for AI satellites used for training. But if they are inference-only, then the latency and bandwidth demands are much, much lower. Starlink already demonstrates the required parameters.
Indeed ... yet the servers for that already exist and are largely ground-based - "edge" compute of the large CDNs through which much of the internet's traffic flows anyway.
Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost. If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.
In 2016, Musk was forecasting no-asterisk-needed cross country self driving and Mars launches within two years.
He may have been a wrong'un before that, but he was definitely already doing a confidence trick by that point.
BBC story linked to this chart which is pretty interesting:
>Internet Connectivity for AS200350 (YandexCloud)
https://ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/asn/200350?from=1791331...
Yandex is one of the most notoriously pro-western companies in Russia, actively supporting relocation attempts. They even removed Russian borders from their maps in 2022. Some people claim they do this day have intelligence sharing agreements with Ukraine.
Also, Yandex have a ban on any pro-russian ads and pro-military stuff (curiously so, not so much against drugs and crime).
Among other things, they actively lobbied for more internet censorship (because as major player they benefited from being white-listed and not affected by them).
People cheering in this thread do not realize that a lot of patriots in Russia will actually support full Yandex demolition.
Oh well. Some people never learn.
> Some people claim they do this day have intelligence sharing agreements with Ukraine.
No or they wouldn't be hit.
It would not be a first time Ukraine did bite a hand that feeds them. It happened every time, including with western allies, see even western-covered scandals with weapons, leaked stuff, recent ongoing south korea scandal etc. If you would count all cases over the years, it would be in hundreds or even thousands.
It probably is incomprehensible to a western mind.
Russia, if you value your stuff you should not start wars you are not prepared to fight.
Just in time to derail Russian disinformation before the election.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/russ...
I'll be curious to see how it affects the mood around HN.
https://status.yandex.cloud/
Ironically, doesn't open for me at the moment :)
That is a status update of sorts.
So three important data centers strategically chosen to be destroyed? As far as i know such an loss couldn't even Google compensate, let alone Yandex. This could severely impact their economy for months.
Google states they have 30 locations around the world. Losing three would be painful but not fatal.
https://datacenters.google/locations/
not all datacenters are created equal. Remember the consequences of the AWS outage caused by problems in just a single region
Should likely share https://status.yandex.cloud/en/timeline as well, though it only shows two of them being hit, not three.
From public sources in last 4 days hits in cities: Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir
Anybody have an idea how this insanity can ever end? Seems Russia is willing to kill off a whole generation of young people. Will this just go on forever? Or will Ukraine run out of soldiers?
Nice! Keep it up boys!
3rd cloud data center so far.
They only have 3. At least, the main ones
Well, that was fast then. Maybe /somebody/ shouldn't have targeted Parkova data center and mobile network cores.
Looks like 4 in Russia, 1 in Kazakhstan if you select the Zones drop down on the status page.
My information may be outdated, but the others are much smaller and less relevant
Reuters says “Yandex operates five data centres” [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
Well, tomorrow we will be hearing about the 4th DC being struck.
It's in Moscow, they have strong air defences.
They've hit targets in Moscow, we'll see.
Still few left. BTW someone built a map of russian largests DCs (use Google Translate): https://hackyourmom.com/karta-data-czentriv-na-rasii/
Everything in Russia depends on Yandex. The impact on both businesses and daily life is massive. You can’t order a taxi or food delivery in most parts of Russia now. Retail chains POS systems in stores and payment systems are down too. Russians on threads and Twitter are complaining they can’t even buy things in stores. Of course, Putin himself doesn’t understand the impact because he barely knows how to use a computer and never uses the Internet.
data centers are civilian targets and globally very poorly defended. if this starts to escalate.. you think ram is expensive now..
They are often dual-use targets today.
Example quote from Azure documentation:
> Azure Government is used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) entities to deploy a broad range of workloads and solutions.
Calling such a DC a civilian target is essentialy incorrect now, and has been for years.
Lots of civilian government agencies also use Azure for government / AWS GovCloud data centers because they’re FedRAMP compliant. It’s not just the DoD.
Yes, that's why I wrote dual-use.
i think you miss interpreted, they are poorly defended because they are civilian, meaning globally data centers are universally undefended from military action. meaning this sort of action can spiral out of control very fast. and would have major global economic adverse effects.
its also important to understand that government isnt non civilian, in this context its non military
Direct attacks on civilian infrastructure can be war crimes. Data centers that host military workloads are not civilian targets.
I didn't misinterpret, you are using incorrect terminology.
Especially on civilian infrastructure like dams that will kill many civilians if they fail, which russia has done
Is https://habr.com normally down?
https://uptimerobot.habr.com doesn't say it's down, but it time outs.
Finally good news from Russia!
That's great!
So they're migrating from on premise to cloud. Good
Good.
Guess it’s just a matter of “when” most datacenters on the MiddleEast will be hit.
can't image the chaos currently due to mass data migration, many businesses must be freaking out.
The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.
Refreshing is also a wording. Drone attack during the war is called "an incident".
The news itself is not so refreshing, I just appreciate the level of transparency and honesty here.
Yandex is pretty good search engine. It has zero censorship. Just the raw internet. Sometimes it more than I've bargained for but as a user I'm happy the option exists.
The severity of the attacks on Russian borders have I believe still a limited effect on the course of the war, but I suppose it certainly won't hurt Ukraine's chances to in some form survive this war.
The real question is will the Russian government survive their disastrous war in some form? 50% of Russia's oil infrastructure and refining capacity has been taken out in the last six months. Do you think Russia will be able to survive that? Disruption of Russian critical infrastructure routes are getting worse by the day. In the border regions you can't even get a truck driver to agree to move a load for $10,000 across some of the highways of Russia that supply Crimea. Ukraine is doing more than just surviving. It is beating Russia.
> 50% of Russia's oil infrastructure and refining capacity has been taken out
No, it has been merely hit (usually once) and typically repaired in the span of a few days. The whole "double-digits percents have been destroyed" typically comes from not so high quality news agencies. Some things were destroyed more thoroughly, but their margin is largely negligible.
Zero censorship? Who do you think you are kidding?
Zero censorship???
> It has zero censorship
My dude, it’s one of the most heavily censored search engines on earth
I think it entirely depends of what censorship you care about. If political censorship is irrelevant to you and puritanistic and copyright censorship is what's in you way then western search engines are more heavily censored.
They should start putting data centers underground like deep under central park
Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)
tough luck
I was going to use Yandex search for find an extremely tiny violin to play, but the yandex search is broken. Oh well.
Is Kagi search still (partially?) relying on Yandex?
Massive data/compute centers should be replace to lot of mini data/compute centers in our homes.
How many major DCs are there in Russia?
Around 200, but hard to say how many so critical as Yandex: https://hackyourmom.com/karta-data-czentriv-na-rasii/
Hey, it's you again :) I think that map features quite prominently on a wall in your home country somewhere with little red 'x' marks on a couple of places. May there soon be many more.
But how on earth are they able to penetrate through all their defensives
Several reasons.
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
"What air defense doing?" is apparently still an unsolved riddle.
Masses of drones. Some get shot down, but not all.
Bold of you to assume they have many defenses left.
Their lines of 50+ years old junk which have been rotting for decades because of corruption and are operated by low iq conscripts with no training?
A mystery really...
Russian air defence equipment bad, organised even worse, and has been severely degraded over 4 years now.
It also seems like a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. UA put logistics/distribution centers under threat (wildberries) and refineries under threat, so the Russians moved their scarce air defense resources around on the map in an attempt to cover those, but oops, that left little or nothing covering the yandex datacenters and similar. There's not enough to go around to cover all of the possible geographically distributed pain points in the economy.
Saturation
The are largely concentrated around Moscow to defend the "brain" of the country, as well as personally Putin himself.
What's an alternative way to find torrents if Yandex goes down?
Try to find some good private trackers to join
1337x.to works just fine
run your own dht crawler
Is it yandex ir nebius?:)
I bet Slack channels in Nebius are on fire these days, but also they managed to make even more money. Entire upper management and all key positions in Nebius are held by ex Yandex-es. I wonder what is going through their heads now
I wonder what's the impact on the Russian disinformation campaigns?
Can we use it to judge which accounts were bots?
Plenty of the bots are real people, even if their behavior is hard to distinguish from bots. HN has lots of them so you can see it right here, just check for the green accounts made just for this thread alone to give you an idea how bad it is.
Nice.
Good
Yandex is the best search engine for stuff banned by the "rotten wect" btw. F Google
While I appreciate the sentiment, the decline of American/Western companies into modern Puritanism is nothing new - but considering the staunch conservatism of the average Russian, I’d say they would do the same thing if they could, they just don’t have the engineering capacity to do the same thing.
American companies and not "Western". American companies have very puritarian rules compared to European cultures.
not for long
Roskomnadzor are laughing their asses off reading this comment.
Everything is fair in love and war. Unless the war stops, they can completely destroy each other.
The general decency of condemning any/all types destruction won't apply here.
This sounds like you're equating the defender's right to counterattack with the attacker's right to continue the attack?
Words are cheap and don't end wars, we can condem all day long it won't change a thing. Fuck russia