Why Strikes on Russian Data Centers Matter More for the Economy Than for Disinformation

Zeihan begins by saying he wants to clear up confusion about the Ukraine war, specifically the attacks on Russian data centers. He notes that most coverage focuses on the amount of spam and hate bots that appear to have vanished from the system, but he says people are not discussing the real issue.

He states that there has not been a meaningful decline in hate bots by the Russians. He notes that Russia does a great deal of disinformation work and that, with the US midterms approaching, it is pulling out all the stops to support or, more likely, denigrate the candidates it does not want. He says that no meaningful restriction on that activity has been seen.

Zeihan explains that internet traffic moves in an automated way, so bot activity can simply go to the next node and be sent out. He adds that the data processing required for a social media post is minimal. He says that seven of Russia's largest data centers have been hit and will probably not reopen for months at a minimum, but that this has not affected their ability to tinker with the political space.

He says the strikes matter for tasks that require more processing and are more time-sensitive. Paying with a credit card, which should go through within a second or perhaps five seconds, is processed through data centers, as are cell phone calls, which need a live connection second by second. When data center capacity is used up, many everyday services that people treat as background start to fail.

Zeihan contrasts Russia with the United States. He says the US has roughly 20,000 data centers, while Russia has only about 200, and only about a dozen of those are larger than about 50 MW, which he says is not particularly large from an American point of view. With seven of them already hit, he argues that the Ukrainian campaign does not need to be very large to cause catastrophic changes to normal life.

He also says that data centers are used for anything on a computer, for communications, and for tasks such as ordering food for grocery stores and maintaining logistics, all of which he calls critical.

Zeihan argues that people forget Russia skipped several stages of development. He says that in the 1980s Russia was using basically 1960s American technology, and that fax machines were even illegal. After the 1990s and the financial crisis of 2008, he says Russia was hammered. After 2008 it began importing large amounts of semiconductors and building its first data centers, and that has accelerated over the 15 years since.

He says that in Russia the intervening technology used by the West in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s does not exist, so the country would go back to relatively early industrial communications technologies. He says that would probably result in at least the economic equivalent of a depression and that the political effect of such a step backward would be horrendous.

Zeihan contrasts this with the US, saying that if Americans went back to faxes, they would be angry and there would be protests, but the system could still function. He is not clear that the Russian system could. He notes that Russia does not have much skilled labor left, that its demographic bomb went off in the 1970s, and that it stopped collecting meaningful data in the 2000s, so it may not even know how bad its situation is. Because skilled labor, especially in IT, costs more in Russia than in the US due to little supply, he says that pulling the plug could send Russia back 40 years or more and produce catastrophic outcomes, which he describes as what is happening in Russia now with the Ukraine war.