US-made chip found inside Russia’s newest missile

A tiny computer chip built by an American company for hobbyist robotics projects and self-driving prototypes has turned up inside one of Russia’s newest missiles, and Ukrainian intelligence says it may be doing the targeting.

Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, known as the GUR, reported that its specialists found an Nvidia Jetson Orin module, a compact onboard computer widely used in commercial robotics and artificial intelligence applications, built into Russia’s new S-71M cruise missile, codenamed Monokhrom, the Russian word for “monochrome.”

The discovery raises the possibility that Moscow has quietly folded American-designed artificial intelligence hardware into a weapon meant to hunt and strike targets with minimal human involvement.

The GUR published its findings through War&Sanctions, an online portal the agency runs to track foreign-made components discovered inside Russian weapons recovered from the battlefield. In this latest release, GUR identified 35 separate electronic components pulled from weapons Russia has used against Ukraine, adding to a growing public database the agency says helps Kyiv and its allies pressure governments and manufacturers to close the gaps that let sanctioned technology reach Russian factories.

According to GUR, the Jetson module recovered from the S-71M includes an onboard camera and currently handles what the agency calls terminal guidance, the final phase of a missile’s flight when it locks onto and steers itself into a target using visual data processed through machine vision algorithms rather than a human operator’s real-time input. GUR noted that similar computer vision guidance technology has previously turned up in other Russian weapons, including the V2U strike drone and the Shahed-236, an Iranian-designed loitering munition Russia has adapted and mass-produced for use against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.

The S-71M itself represents Russia’s attempt to build a missile that increasingly makes its own decisions in flight. According to GUR’s description, the Monokhrom carries a warhead weighing 250 kilograms (551 pounds), travels at speeds between 500 and 600 kilometers per hour (311 to 373 miles per hour), and reaches targets at a range of 350 to 400 kilometers (217 to 249 miles), launched from Russia’s Su-57 fighter jet, the country’s stealth aircraft developed to rival American fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35. GUR says the S-71M has been used sparingly in combat since early 2026, suggesting Russia is still working through the kind of operational testing that typically precedes wider deployment of a new weapon system. Earlier open-source reporting on the S-71 missile family has described the Monokhrom variant as an autonomous strike weapon designed to independently search a target area, identify a target using an onboard database, and make the decision to attack without waiting for a human controller, a capability that would place it among a small but growing category of weapons capable of selecting and engaging targets with reduced human oversight.

The Monokhrom is the more advanced sibling of an earlier missile in the same family, the S-71K, known by the codename Kover, meaning “Carpet.” GUR has previously described the S-71K as a stealthy cruise missile built with a low radar cross section specifically to survive Ukrainian air defenses, reporting that Russia has used it in combat since late 2025 and that it can reach targets up to 350 kilometers (217 miles) away. A separate assessment shared by the open-source defense analyst known as Status-6 places the S-71K’s range closer to 300 kilometers (186 miles) and describes its warhead as based on the OFAB-250-270, a Soviet-designed 250 kilogram (551 pound) high-explosive fragmentation aerial bomb adapted for missile use, with the Su-57 again serving as its primary launch platform. The gap between GUR’s stated range and the lower figure cited by Status-6 remains unresolved in available reporting, and neither the Russian government nor Sukhoi, the missile’s manufacturer, has publicly confirmed either figure.

GUR said its specialists, working alongside researchers from Ukrainian scientific institutions, continue examining captured and recovered Russian weapons to trace the origin of their electronic components piece by piece. The agency argues that two years of running the War&Sanctions portal have produced a consistent pattern: despite sweeping international sanctions imposed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Moscow still cannot fully replace foreign high-technology components with domestically manufactured alternatives, leaving its most advanced weapons dependent on parts sourced from the United States, Europe, and Asia through what GUR describes as gray-market supply networks that route around export controls.

That dependency is precisely the vulnerability Ukraine’s intelligence service says it wants to expose. Each chip, camera, and guidance module GUR traces back to a foreign manufacturer becomes a data point its Western partners can use to tighten export enforcement, pressure suppliers, and choke off the specific pathways that let sanctioned technology slip through third countries and into a missile aimed at a Ukrainian city.