Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel

Datacenters are full of metal. Warehouses are full of cardboard boxes and styrofoam.

A rack of 14 $5k servers is worth $70k. A half-pallet stacked two meters high with $50 rubber dicks, each in a 30x10x10 cm box, is worth around $24k, and has the same form factor. There are more expensive servers but there are also more expensive products.

But large data centers would be maybe 10k square meters in one building, while the largest building of the Elektrostal Wildberries warehouse was over 150k sqm.

A datacenter, if successfully and completely burned down, would of course cause disruption (although in a well designed redundant system it shouldn't), but doing so is harder and burning down a major logistics hub causes disruption too.

The warehouse also leaves a hard to deny, widely visible reminder to the population that the war has consequences, in the form of a Moscow-sized smoke cloud: https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=33.290517136221574,5... (plus endless videos of small sellers lamenting their fate).