Yandex Cloud will launch another Russian availability zone in 2026, based at a new data center.

Located near the company's existing data center in the Vladimir region of Russia, the facility will have a capacity of more than 40MW and a claimed PUE of 1.1, achieved through the use of free-cooling technology throughout the data center.

In a blog post announcing the news, Ivan Puzyrevsky, CTO of Yandex Cloud, stated that the availability zone would support data transfer latency of less than one millisecond to adjacent zones, with a total channel capacity of up to 25.6Tbps between them.

He added that communication channels with other availability zones will be independent of each other, providing additional fault tolerance for the cloud infrastructure. In addition to launching the new zone, Yandex will be the first company in Russia to launch tools for conducting infrastructure resiliency exercises.

Yandex operates five data centers in Russia, located in Vladimir, Sasovo, Ivanteevka, Mytishchi, and Kaluga Oblast, around 200 miles south of Moscow. The company’s cloud unit decommissioned one of its availability zones in the Russia cloud region in August 2023.

Yandex's holding company was previously based in the Netherlands, but separated its European and Russian operations, fully divesting Yandex from the company in February 2024 as part of a strategic move following the outbreak of the Ukraine war. The European operations are now known as Nebius.