Drones Hit Yandex's AI Servers as PC Shipments Crash 20%
Drones knock out two Yandex data centers, PC shipments fall 20.1%, and Samsung guides to a record quarter.
Good morning. The war in Ukraine reached Russia's AI servers, PC shipments fell off a cliff, and Samsung printed a record.
Drones knock out two Yandex data centers in two days
A Ukrainian drone strike on Thursday started a fire at Yandex's data center in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, and forced the company to halt operations there. Reuters called it the first major attack on a Russian data hub. On Friday, Yandex said several modules at a second site, in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, had been completely disabled by another drone attack.
Sasovo matters beyond the outage. It houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models, and the company says it can't yet tell whether the damaged equipment can be restored. Yandex Cloud customers were told to shift workloads to other zones, and several Russian websites reported problems.
Volodymyr Zelensky didn't claim the strikes, but said Ukraine responds "in mirror-like fashion" to Russian attacks on its own data centers. Yandex said no one was injured in Kaluga.
PC shipments fall 20% as high prices bite
Worldwide PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year to 62.7 million units in the third quarter, according to preliminary IDC figures released Thursday. They also fell 9.1% from the second quarter, breaking the usual pattern of Q3 beating Q2.
IDC blames a first-half rush: vendors stocked up ahead of memory-driven price hikes, leaving little demand for the summer. HP fell 30.9% and Dell 25%; Apple dropped 11.3% but gained share. IDC expects prices to stay well above year-ago levels.
Samsung guides to a record ₩107 trillion quarter
Samsung Electronics on Thursday in Seoul guided to third-quarter operating profit of about 107.4 trillion won on sales of about 195 trillion won. A year earlier it made 12.17 trillion won; last quarter, 89.49 trillion.
Samsung gave no breakdown by division, though analysts credit demand for memory chips used in AI data centers. Full results arrive later this month.
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Meta stops taking ByteDance's ads in seven countries
Meta has banned ads from ByteDance, TikTok's US minority owner, on Facebook, Instagram and its other apps in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The ban also covers third-party campaigns that point to TikTok or other ByteDance services.
"We don't have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said. It follows TikTok removing links to rival social profiles.
Anthropic sends engineers to defend grids and water systems
Anthropic on Thursday launched its Cyber Mission, starting with a Critical Infrastructure Defense Program that gives security providers frontier Claude models, on-site engineers and threat research. The 11 founding partners include CrowdStrike, Dragos, Palo Alto Networks and Rockwell Automation.
It also launched OSS Scanner, a free opt-in service that sends open-source projects regular vulnerability reports with proof-of-concept exploits. The reports skip human review, and Anthropic says it expects a true-positive rate above 90%.
A Pixel 10 hack takes Pwn2Own Ireland's top prize
Pwn2Own Ireland wrapped up Thursday with $1,262,000 paid out for 98 zero-days over three days. Three teams remotely hacked Google's Pixel 10 on the final day, and Ikotas Labs took $300,000 for its exploit plus the Master of Pwn title.
Vendors now have 90 days to fix the bugs before details are published.
India Mobile Congress heads into its last two days
The 10th India Mobile Congress continues today at Yashobhoomi in New Delhi and runs through Saturday. It began Wednesday, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it Thursday under the theme "Scale Without Boundaries." Watch for 6G, AI networks, satellite links and quantum communication. Organizers expect more than 150,000 attendees.
Thanks for reading. See you Monday.