Yandex Cloud is the public cloud platform of Yandex, the Russian internet group best known for its search engine. It rents computing power, storage, managed databases, analytics tools and artificial intelligence (AI) models to businesses, which pay for what they consume rather than buying and running their own servers. It resembles Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure in function but serves a far narrower market: companies operating in Russia, plus a regional operation in Kazakhstan. It exists because Yandex already ran some of the largest data centres in Russia for its own services and saw a business in selling that capacity, and because Russian rules on storing citizens' personal data inside the country gave local providers an advantage over foreign ones.

The platform has become more than a hosting business. It is the commercial route through which Yandex sells its YandexGPT language models to other companies, and its own data centres carry Yandex's search, advertising and consumer apps. Drone strikes on three Yandex facilities this month pushed the platform into what the company calls "a limited mode".

How the platform is built

Yandex Cloud organises capacity into regions and availability zones, the standard model across the industry. A region is a geographic area; a zone is an independent data centre within it, with its own power and cooling, so that a failure in one does not take down the others. The Russian region, ru-central1, listed zones ru-central1-a, ru-central1-b, ru-central1-d and ru-central1-e in its documentation as of October 2026, plus ru-central1-m for dedicated bare-metal servers. A separate region, kz1, runs from a data centre in Karaganda that opened on April 10, 2024, with its own console and billing in tenge.

According to its documentation, the platform is hosted in four Yandex data centres. Those buildings are not exclusive to cloud customers: Yandex Cloud runs in the same facilities as Yandex's consumer services, separated by hardware firewalls.

The catalogue falls into familiar layers:

  • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Compute Cloud virtual machines, Object Storage, load balancers and GPU servers.
  • Platform as a service (PaaS): managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse and Kafka, a managed Kubernetes service for containers, and Cloud Functions for serverless code.
  • Data and business tools: DataLens for dashboards, which connects to Yandex Metrica and AppMetrica analytics, and Tracker for project management.
  • AI services: SpeechKit for speech recognition and synthesis, Translate, Vision, and Yandex AI Studio, the platform that serves YandexGPT and third-party models through an application programming interface (API).

The mix matters for reading the revenue. In the first half of 2026, IaaS accounted for 52% of Yandex Cloud revenue, PaaS for 41%, and AI and information security together for 9%, according to the company. Banking and fintech, retail and IT companies made up 83% of consumption. The typical customer is a Russian bank or retailer renting servers, not a start-up calling an AI model.

From internal infrastructure to a business unit

Yandex began closed testing in April 2018 with more than 50 companies, including Tinkoff Bank, S7 Airlines and X5 Retail Group. On September 5, 2018, it opened Yandex.Cloud as a public platform, with access on request and general availability planned for the end of that year. The announcement stressed that customers could keep personal data in Russia. Russia's data localisation law, Federal Law 242-FZ, had required that since September 1, 2015.

The unit became a separate business in October 2020, and plans for an expansion into Germany were seemingly dropped after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to Datacenter Dynamics. That same month, foreign competition receded. Google paused ad serving to users in Russia from March 3, 2022, and western cloud providers curtailed Russian business.

Capacity strain followed. On March 10, 2022, Yandex announced the phased retirement of zone ru-central1-c, a converted "brown field" site that, the company wrote, could not be made "into an infinitely scalable resource". A purpose-built replacement, ru-central1-d, was scheduled for the third quarter of 2023.

AI arrived next. Yandex invited businesses to a closed test of YandexGPT in June 2023 and, on December 19, 2023, opened the YandexGPT API through Yandex Cloud to companies worldwide. Pilots drew more than 20,000 applications, Yandex said. YandexGPT 5 reached the platform in February 2025. At the Yandex Neuro Scale conference on September 24, 2025, Yandex presented a new version of AI Studio with an agent builder, retrieval tools and a model gallery that included open-weight models from other developers, such as Qwen3 and Gemma.

Ownership and the 2024 split

Yandex Cloud's ownership changed with its parent. Until 2024 Yandex was controlled by Yandex N.V., a Dutch holding company listed on Nasdaq. On February 4, 2024, it agreed to sell its Russian businesses, Yandex Cloud included, to a buyer group known as Consortium.First, led by Yandex Russia's management and backed by four financial investors. The deal closed on July 15, 2024, at a valuation of about $5.4 billion, according to the seller. The Dutch company kept a Finnish data centre and several international units and became Nebius Group, now an AI infrastructure provider in its own right. The Yandex brand stayed with the businesses sold in Russia.

Why it matters for marketers

For advertisers, Yandex Cloud matters mostly as infrastructure underneath a market that western platforms have left. Google deactivated Russia-based AdSense accounts in August 2024, leaving Yandex's own advertising network as the dominant performance channel in the country. Yandex's advertising and promotion turnover reached 128 billion roubles in the second quarter of 2026, up 12%, according to its results. The same YandexGPT and YandexART models sold to cloud customers write ad text and images inside Yandex's campaign interface, a feature Yandex introduced on June 11, 2024.

Outside Russia, Yandex's footprint is smaller. Yandex held 2.954% of global search traffic in March 2025, third behind Baidu and Bing. Yet data flows to Yandex systems are a live compliance question. The Dutch data protection authority fined MLU, parent of Yandex-linked ride-hailing app Yango, 100 million euros for sending Finnish and Norwegian personal data to Yandex entities in Russia, citing the risk of state access.

Yandex Cloud revenue rose 39% to 27.6 billion roubles in 2025, with about 93% from external customers, according to the company. In the first half of 2026 it grew 30% to 16.7 billion roubles, with more than 64,000 clients. Tokens processed through the AI Studio API exceeded 597 billion, 18 times the year-earlier figure. For context, iKS-Consulting put the whole Russian cloud services market at 416.5 billion roubles in 2025, up 32.8%, so Yandex Cloud's 2025 revenue equalled roughly 7% of that total, although the two figures are not measured on the same basis.

Limitations and disputes

Concentration is the most obvious weakness. With four data centres in one country, one incident can remove a large share of capacity.

Market position is contested. Yandex Cloud is not the largest Russian provider by every measure: iKS-Consulting ranked Sberbank-owned Cloud.ru first in IaaS and PaaS, with a 32.5% share. Selectel, VK Cloud, MTS and MegaFon also compete.

Hardware access is constrained. United States export controls restrict sales of advanced Nvidia AI chips to Russia. Yandex's most powerful supercomputer, Chervonenkis, ranked 19th on the TOP500 list in 2021 but later fell into the second hundred amid sanctions-related difficulties in updating its infrastructure, according to Meduza.

State access worries foreign customers. In June 2019 Yandex refused a Federal Security Service (FSB) request for encryption keys covering email and cloud storage under the Yarovaya law, and officials later said an arrangement had been reached to supply the data instead. Russian authorities also restrict foreign infrastructure: since June 9, 2025, Russian internet providers have throttled connections to Cloudflare to about 16KB, which pushes workloads towards domestic clouds.

Sanctions exposure is indirect so far. On July 23, 2026, the EU's 21st sanctions package listed Yandex Bank among 94 banks, according to Meduza; no Yandex cloud entity was reported among the listings.

Not to be confused with

  • Nebius: the former Yandex N.V., now a Netherlands-based AI cloud with no ownership link to Yandex Cloud since July 2024.
  • Yandex 360 and Yandex Disk: Yandex's productivity suite and file storage, sold to people and businesses. Their revenue is reported alongside Yandex Cloud as "B2B Tech" but they are separate products.
  • Yandex Direct: Yandex's advertising platform. It sits in the search and advertising business, not in Yandex Cloud.
  • YandexBot: the crawler that indexes web pages for Yandex Search. It is covered in a separate explainer.

Recent developments

Overnight on October 7-8, 2026, a drone attack caused a fire at Yandex's data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. "Data center operations have been completely halted," Yandex Cloud said, according to The Register, and zone ru-central1-b went down. Sasovo housed two of Yandex's three supercomputers, Meduza reported. A strike on October 9 destroyed several modules at the Kaluga site, which has more than 3,800 racks and a design capacity of 63 megawatts (MW), according to SecurityLab. On October 11, a third strike shut down the Vladimir facility, and zone ru-central1-a became unavailable. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attacks responded to Russian strikes on data centres in Kyiv.

On October 10, Yandex Cloud moved compute and disk quotas to manual approval, and on October 11 it stopped issuing additional quotas, according to SecurityLab. It agreed with Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud to speed up placement for affected customers. Today, The Register reported Yandex Cloud's latest update: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode." The company recommended "using alternative sites for hosting and reserving resources". No date for full recovery had been given.

Timeline

  • September 1, 2015 - Russia's personal data localisation law takes effect.
  • April 2018 - Closed testing begins with more than 50 companies.
  • September 5, 2018 - Yandex.Cloud opens as a public platform, with general availability planned for the end of 2018.
  • October 2020 - Yandex Cloud becomes a separate business unit.
  • March 3, 2022 - Google pauses ad serving to users in Russia.
  • March 10, 2022 - Yandex announces the phased retirement of zone ru-central1-c.
  • June 2023 - Closed test of YandexGPT for business customers begins.
  • Third quarter of 2023 - Replacement zone ru-central1-d scheduled to launch.
  • December 19, 2023 - YandexGPT API opens to businesses worldwide through Yandex Cloud.
  • February 4, 2024 - Yandex N.V. agrees to sell its Russian businesses to Consortium.First.
  • April 10, 2024 - Region kz1 opens with a data centre in Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
  • June 11, 2024 - YandexGPT and YandexART begin generating ad creatives in Yandex's campaign interface.
  • July 15, 2024 - Sale completes; Yandex N.V. becomes Nebius Group.
  • February 2025 - YandexGPT 5 becomes available in Yandex Cloud.
  • June 9, 2025 - Russian internet providers begin throttling Cloudflare connections.
  • September 24, 2025 - New version of Yandex AI Studio presented at Neuro Scale 2025.
  • July 23, 2026 - EU 21st sanctions package lists Yandex Bank.
  • August 12, 2026 - Yandex Cloud reports first-half revenue of 16.7 billion roubles, up 30%.
  • October 8, 2026 - Drone strike halts the Sasovo data centre; zone ru-central1-b goes down.
  • October 9, 2026 - Kaluga data centre hit.
  • October 11, 2026 - Vladimir data centre shut down; zone ru-central1-a unavailable; additional quotas suspended.
  • October 12, 2026 - Platform still operating in limited mode.

Summary

Who: Yandex, the Russian internet group owned since July 2024 by Consortium.First and its successors, operates Yandex Cloud, led as of October 2026 by chief executive Grigory Atrepiev. Its customers are mainly Russian banks, retailers and IT companies.

What: A public cloud platform renting virtual machines, storage, managed databases, analytics and AI models, including YandexGPT through Yandex AI Studio.

When: Testing began in April 2018 and the public platform opened on September 5, 2018. Drone strikes between October 8 and 11, 2026 left it in limited operation.

Where: Data centres in Russia, in the ru-central1 region, and in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, in the kz1 region.

Why: Yandex turned its own infrastructure into a business, helped by Russian data localisation rules and the retreat of western providers after 2022; its concentration in a few domestic sites is now its main exposure.