Ukraine’s fiber-optic drones get squeezed by AI data center demand
Impervious to battlefield jamming, drones physically connected to human operators by miles of fiber-optic cables have become such a common weapon of war in Ukraine that trees and fields are strewn with tangled cables thinner than fishing lines.
Key points
- The finished spools can hold enough fiber-optic cable for drones to regularly operate at ranges of dozens of miles, and sometimes up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) in extreme cases, as reported by the independent Russian publication The Insider.
- The Ukrainians quickly followed suit in developing their own fiber-optic drones, given the drones’ capability to shrug off electronic warfare jamming that could neutralize radio-controlled drones.
- But it was the Russian military that first deployed unjammable fiber-optic drones to repel Ukrainian forces’ cross-border incursion into the Kursk Oblast in 2024.
But importing such fiber-optic material from China has become more costly as drone warfare’s needs compete with global demand from AI data centers for the same limited supply—and so Ukrainian drone makers have been adapting.
Additional details
- Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the Ukrainians have been forced out of necessity to continually develop battlefield innovations involving first-person view (FPV) quadcopter drones and other heavier types of drones.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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