Drone strikes push Russian firms to Kazakhstan as Putin seizes 10%

What the October strikes hit

The attacks landed on facilities connected to some of Russia's largest technology and financial organizations.

According to reporting by Kommersant, the October 2026 drone strikes affected data center sites associated with Yandex, VK, Sberbank and Russia's Federal Tax Service. The six affected regions — Vladimir, Kaluga, Leningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan and Saratov — all sit in European Russia, the country's industrial and population core.

The strikes did not wipe out Russian cloud computing. But they made a point that no risk register could ignore: commercial data centers in a war zone are now legitimate military targets, and a backup site a few hundred kilometers away may sit on the same threat map.

Why Russian firms are looking at Kazakhstan

Yevgeny Svidersky, vice president of cloud services at ITGlobal.com, told Kommersant on November 10 that interest in overseas facilities had risen sharply.

Kazakhstan has become the most attractive destination, with Belarus also under consideration for hosting AI infrastructure and backup systems. Two industry sources told Kommersant that some businesses have already begun moving workloads, though the scale of those migrations is not clear.

The logic is geographic redundancy, not wholesale relocation. Alexey Borshchov, an AI project business architect at Avandok, described companies looking for backup sites in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan at the same time, with some cloud providers discussing reserved capacity in 'friendly countries' with clients.

The math behind the move is brutal. Moscow reportedly has only about 50 megawatts of unused data center capacity — enough for roughly two to four large commercial facilities. Nationwide, Kommersant's sources estimate nearly 90% of cloud resources are already occupied.

Putin's 10% order changes the calculation

The same week the migration talk surfaced, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree requiring privately operated data centers to set aside 10% of their capacity for Russian information services.

Operators have 10 days to make that capacity available. They can keep using the reserved resources themselves until a government subcommission instructs them to hand capacity to designated domestic services — at which point they must comply within 24 hours.

The decree does not transfer ownership, but it gives the state a switch to flip in an emergency. For a company already weighing whether to keep its disaster-recovery site inside Russia, that is one more reason to look across the border.

There is a tension here that no amount of cloud architecture solves: the firms reducing their exposure to domestic infrastructure are the same firms the state now wants on standby.

The bigger picture for critical infrastructure

Data centers have spent two decades being treated as boring real estate. War has made them strategic assets.

The same pressure is visible far from Russia. Power availability is now the binding constraint on AI buildouts worldwide, as xAI's scramble for jet engines to power its clusters showed. Governments everywhere are waking up to the fact that compute is infrastructure in the same category as ports and power grids — and infrastructure gets targeted.

For Western operators, the Russian case is a stress test worth watching. Geographic redundancy, grid independence and physical security are moving from compliance checkboxes to board-level questions.

What it means for you

This story has no direct consumer product or US/EU pricing attached. Its relevance for Western readers is indirect: it shows how quickly commercial cloud capacity can become a national-security asset, and why regulators in the US and EU are tightening rules on where critical workloads can physically run.

For businesses with operations in Russia or nearby markets, the practical takeaway is that backup sites need to sit outside the same threat envelope as primary facilities — a principle that applies well beyond this conflict.

Russia's cloud market is being squeezed from two directions at once: drones outside and decrees inside. Whether Kazakhstan becomes a genuine refuge or a temporary workaround depends on how far Moscow is willing to push its capacity seizure — and how many operators decide the risk of staying is now higher than the cost of leaving.