Ukraine has struck three major data centers owned by Russian tech company Yandex in recent days, including a facility in Sasovo that houses supercomputers used to train Yandex's AI model. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the strikes as a 'symmetrical response' to Russia's own drone campaign against Ukrainian data centers and telecom networks that began in late September and disrupted service for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv.
Meta has released two new AI models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, trained at its gigawatt-scale Prometheus data center. The company says the models build on earlier work shown with Muse Spark and post state-of-the-art results on benchmarks covering agents, memory, and coding, including domain-specific tests in law, finance and health such as Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark.
Yandex confirmed that drone attacks damaged three of its data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir between October 8-11, knocking two facilities offline entirely and degrading the third. Customers have reported being unable to access files stored on Yandex's cloud infrastructure, and the company says it cannot give a reliable timeline for restoring service. Yandex has urged customers to switch to alternative disaster-recovery infrastructure while its teams work to stabilize the remaining systems.
Indian wearables startup Ultrahuman has signed a two-year MOU with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center to build and validate a model estimating biological age by combining clinical biomarkers with wearable data. The company says the model will eventually be rolled out to people across the UAE and will work with data from devices beyond its own smart ring. Ultrahuman has sold about 800,000 smart rings globally to date.
Amazon now operates more than 1 million robots across its warehouses, making it the largest robot operator in the world, according to the company. Despite this automation push, Amazon remains the second-largest corporate employer globally with over 1.5 million full- and part-time human workers, per its 2025 annual report, and plans to expand its robot fleet further through new manufacturing facilities.
Following Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers, a Cloudflare chart showing a drop in Yandex-related bot traffic spread widely on social media, with many assuming it showed Russian disinformation bots going offline. Researcher antibot4navalny says the data actually reflects a decline in Yandex's own web crawler activity, not social media bot farms, and that broader Russian bot traffic was largely unaffected. A separate chart claiming to show a drop in pro-AfD online activity, shared by EU lawmaker Tomáš Zdechovský, has been flagged by computer scientist Raphael Wimmer as possibly AI-generated.
Data centers generate heat continuously, and researchers are examining ways to capture that excess warmth and store it underground using the earth's stable temperature, so it can later be drawn out to heat buildings during colder months. The approach relies on the fact that ground temperature a few hundred feet down stays near the local yearly average, roughly 50°F, regardless of surface conditions.
Amazon announced it will stop using nondisclosure agreements when negotiating with local governments over new data centers, mirroring a similar move by Microsoft. The announcement appeared within a broader Amazon blog post arguing that data centers benefit the communities where they are built.
Texas regulators are requiring data center projects to wait longer before connecting to the state's power grid, according to reporting referenced in the source. The move reflects growing concern over the strain that rapidly expanding data center demand is placing on Texas's electricity infrastructure.
Cloudflare data shows bot traffic from Yandex's network has collapsed to just 0.4% of its two-week peak following a third Ukrainian drone strike on the company's data centers. Earlier strikes hit a Sasovo facility housing two supercomputers and a larger campus in Kaluga, while Yandex Cloud's status page lists at least 84 services currently offline. NetBlocks reports Yandex Cloud traffic down to 30% and Yandex LLC traffic down to 63%.
A new analysis from the Environment America Research and Policy Center, highlighted by Electrek, projects that gas-fired generator capacity in the US will grow by roughly 20 gigawatts, a 44 percent jump from today's 41.8 gigawatts, within four years. The report attributes much of this growth to surging electricity demand from AI data centers, and notes that planned wind farm capacity has fallen 34 percent since December 2025.
As public backlash grows against Flock Safety's automatic license plate readers, police departments are increasingly adopting Axon's Fusus platform, which merges feeds from body cameras, dashcams, 911 calls, gunshot detectors, drones and CCTV into a single dashboard. Law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson told NPR these 'real-time crime centers' already combine far more surveillance tools than ALPR cameras alone, including video analytics with retroactive search capability.
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