Summary
- Russian officials have claimed that the De Novo data centre in Kyiv was struck during attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.
- The claim has not been independently verified, and DataCentral has found no public De Novo statement confirming the reported damage.
- De Novo’s Kyiv infrastructure supports commercial and public-sector workloads and includes redundant power, cooling, and telecommunications systems.
Russian authorities have claimed that the Kyiv data centre operated by De Novo was struck during a wider series of attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, although the extent of any damage has not been independently confirmed.
The claim was reported through Russian state media and subsequently by specialist data centre publications. DataCentral has not found a public statement from De Novo confirming that its Kyiv facility was hit or describing its operational status following the reported attack.
That distinction is important because claims made by parties to an active conflict cannot be treated as independent evidence of damage, service interruption, or the military use of a civilian facility.
De Novo describes itself as a Ukrainian sovereign cloud and AI provider operating mission-critical systems. Its customer and infrastructure information shows that the company supports banks, government-linked services, businesses, and other organisations requiring high-availability IT systems.
The company’s Kyiv data centre was commissioned in 2010 and later expanded. De Novo lists total capacity of 360 rack spaces across the facility.
Its main DC-1 building covers 2,117 square metres and has 3.05MW of total electrical capacity, including 1.05MW of IT capacity. A second block, DC-5, provides a further 500kW of IT capacity.
The engineering design includes two high-voltage power inputs, four diesel generator sets configured with redundancy, redundant UPS and battery rooms, and chilled-water cooling equipment. The site also has multiple telecoms routes and operator presence intended to reduce dependence on a single communications path.
Those provisions are designed around conventional equipment failures and utility interruptions. Armed conflict introduces a different class of physical risk because redundant components can remain exposed to the same geographic event if they occupy one campus or depend on common upstream infrastructure.
That distinction has become increasingly relevant to data centre resilience in Ukraine. Operators have had to consider not only grid outages and telecommunications disruption, but damage to buildings, fuel logistics, staff access, network routes, and supporting energy infrastructure.
De Novo says it has continued to support mission-critical systems through the war and now operates infrastructure in Ukraine and Germany. Geographic separation is one of the few controls capable of reducing exposure to a site-level destructive event, provided customer architectures and recovery processes are designed to make use of it.
The reported attack also reinforces the changing security environment around commercial digital infrastructure. Data centres have traditionally been protected primarily against fire, equipment failure, unauthorised access, cyberattack, utility interruption, and severe weather. In conflict zones they may also sit within the wider risk surrounding energy, telecommunications, logistics, and state infrastructure.
Resilience therefore extends beyond achieving a particular redundancy topology inside the building. A facility can have duplicated power trains and cooling equipment while remaining dependent on a local grid, road network, telecommunications corridors, fuel supply, and workforce that are all exposed to the same external disruption.
Russia has alleged that the De Novo facility supported Ukrainian military systems. That allegation has not been independently substantiated in the available material and should not be confused with De Novo’s publicly documented role hosting commercial, financial, and government-related workloads.
Until De Novo or another independently verifiable source establishes the physical and operational status of the site, the reported strike remains a claim rather than a confirmed data centre outage. The episode nonetheless shows why geographic redundancy and recovery capability have become central engineering concerns for operators responsible for critical digital services in Ukraine.
