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).

Hitting the enemy where it hurts. It's much more effective to hurt Russian morale by making big explosions and petrol rain from striking a refinery or stopping/delaying shipments to the front line than by shutting down a center where a handful of people work and that won't directly impact the war. Ukraine must making fighting painful enough that the Russians withdraw, because the math of attrition favors the much more populous and richer Russians long term.

the point of hitting them is to cause commercial damage to american companies. In reality, this changes little in terms of US capacity. Doing the equivalent of this to Russia would be attacking their oil ports and infrastructure.

wildberries has been taken over by an oligarch and the only powers in Russia that Putin may hear are the oligarchs. There will be no 'overthrow of Putin' in Russia because there is no institutional support and it is well understood by literate people - a revolution is not just a disorganized uprising on the streets (what happens the next day? - return to normal) it requires years of planning and support.

Do they even still exist? It's not easy to find even a small russian VPS to be a reverse proxy for your encrypted messenger project any more.