A Ukrainian drone attack on the city of Balakovo in Saratov Region damaged several residential buildings and killed one person, regional governor Roman Busargin reported on the morning of Oct. 14.
The Ukrainian monitoring channel Supernova+ claims that a Sberbank data center under construction there was hit, a conclusion confirmed by Astra’s OSINT analysis. Photos from the scene suggest the strike damaged the data center building, along with a hangar of unknown purpose located about 200 meters from it.
Sberbank itself later reported the attack on the data center in Balakovo to the state-owned news agency TASS. “We confirm the fact of the attack on the data center. However, all Sberbank systems and services are operating normally,” said Sberbank’s First Deputy Chairman of the Board Alexander Vedyakhin.
A video posted by eyewitnesses shows a bright flash after an explosion, followed by a power outage in several nearby houses. The area where the explosion occurred is home to an industrial zone with the combined heat and power plant TETs-4, a district electric grid (RES) facility, and a railcar plant. Power cuts in a residential block may indicate that the RES was also hit.
A memorandum on building the data center in Balakovo was signed in December 2020 between Sberbank, the government of the Saratov Region, and the electricity provider Rosseti. The Balakovo data center had been set to become Sberbank’s largest in Russia, with some 120,000 servers housed on an area of 60,000 square meters. Construction of the facility was due to be completed in the first quarter of 2027. It is unclear how the strike may affect those plans.
