Yandex is a Russian technology company that runs search, cloud and AI chatbot services. Recent coverage focused on Ukrainian drone strikes on its data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions on October 8-9, which took them offline and disrupted its AI chatbot and online services. Other stories covered its open-source AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base model, a developer's finetuning progress, and Russia's Federal Law No. 243-FZ on foundational AI models.
Ukraine drone strikes push Russia to move data centers undergroundUkrainian drone strikes hit data centers run by Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte and Russia's Finance Ministry, disrupting cloud services for millions. Russian firms are hardening or hiding facilities, with Rostelecom discussing underground sites with Norilsk, while the Kremlin requires owners to reserve capacity for state emergencies.
Russia's data centers hit by Ukrainian drone strikesUkrainian drone strikes knocked out three of Yandex's largest data centers in Russia, causing widespread digital service outages. Pro-Kremlin bloggers warn Russia's centralized digital economy could collapse, while Ukraine's decentralized services may be more resilient.
Ukrainian drones strike two Yandex AI data centersUkrainian drones struck two of Yandex's five data centers in Russia's Sasovo and Kaluga regions on October 8-9, taking them offline and disrupting the tech giant's AI chatbot and online services. The strikes were a direct response to Russian drone attacks on Ukrainian data centers since late September, with Zelenskyy calling it a symmetrical response.
Developer posts update on local Yandex 80B finetuneA developer on Reddit shared progress finetuning Yandex's AliceAI-80B-A3B base model. After the first SFT round the model showed chain-of-thought reasoning and conversation ability but was underfit from insufficient instruct data, so the alpha checkpoint won't be released. Next, roughly 5M more general instruct tokens will be added, training locally on three 32GB V100s.
Sovereign AI Becomes Russia's New Technology PriorityRussia's Federal Law No. 243-FZ creates a legal framework for large foundational AI models, introducing "sovereign" and "national" categories requiring development by Russian entities with data stored domestically. Yandex open-sourced a new model and Sber showcased GigaAgent, as the policy reshapes procurement, cloud infrastructure and data governance.
Yandex Releases 80B AliceAI Foundation ModelYandex released AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base, a Russian-developed competitor to Qwen 35B and DeepSeek V4 Flash. It uses a fully custom architecture rather than a Qwen3 finetune, has not been post-trained, and currently lacks llama.cpp support.
The A.I. Daily