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Data storage and resilience company Lonestar<\/a> and semiconductor and storage company Phison<\/a> launched a data center infrastructure on a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday that\u2019s headed to the moon.<\/p>\n The companies are sending Phison\u2019s Pascari storage \u2014 solid state drives (SSDs) built for data centers \u2014 packed with Lonestar\u2019s clients\u2019 data on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set to land on March 4. This marks the beginning of a lunar data center, the first ever, that the companies plan to expand in the future until it holds a petabyte of storage.<\/p>\n Chris Stott, the founder, chair, and CEO of Lonestar, told TechCrunch that the idea to build a data center in space originated back in 2018 \u2014\u00a0years before the current AI-driven surge in data center demand. He said customers were seeking ways to store their data off Earth so it would be immune from things like climate disasters and hacking.<\/p>\n \u201cHumanity\u2019s most precious item, outside of us, is data,\u201d Stott said. \u201cThey see data as the new oil. I\u2019d say it\u2019s more precious than that.\u201d<\/p>\n Stott said partnering with Phison to build a space data center was a natural choice. Phison already provides storage solutions for space missions through NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover on Mars. The company also offers a design service called Imagine Plus, which develops custom storage solutions for unique projects.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were very excited when there\u2019s a call from Chris,\u201d Michael Wu, the general manager and president of Phison, told TechCrunch. \u201cWe took a standard product and were able to customize whatever they need for these products and we launched it. So it\u2019s a very exciting journey.\u201d<\/p>\n Lonestar partnered with Phison in 2021, and since then, they have been developing SSD storage units designed for space. Stott added that the companies spent years testing the product before their first launch because the tech has to be rock solid \u2014 it can\u2019t easily be fixed if an issue arises.<\/p>\n \u201c[This is] why SSDs are so important,\u201d Stott said. \u201cNo moving parts. It\u2019s remarkable technology that\u2019s allowing us to do what we\u2019re doing for these governments and hopefully almost every government in the world as we go forward and almost every company and corporation.\u201d<\/p>\n Stott said the tech has been launch-ready since 2023 and the company successfully conducted a test launch in early 2024.<\/p>\n Wednesday\u2019s launch included various types of customer data, ranging from multiple governments interested in disaster recovery to a space agency testing a large language model. Even the band Imagine Dragons participated, sending a music video for one of their songs from the Starfield space game soundtrack.<\/p>\n Lonestar isn\u2019t the only company looking to bring data centers into space. Another contender, Lumen Orbit, emerged from Y Combinator\u2019s Summer 2024 batch. The startup garnered one of the buzziest seed rounds<\/a> from that YC cohort, raising more than $21 million and rebranding as Starcloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n As AI-driven demand for hardware accelerates, it\u2019s likely we\u2019ll see more companies pursue space-based storage solutions, which offer nearly infinite storage capacity and solar energy, advantages that Earth-bound data centers can\u2019t match. <\/p>\n For Lonestar, if all goes well, the company plans to collaborate with satellite manufacturer Sidus Space to build six data storage spacecraft that the company expects to launch between 2027 and 2030.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s fascinating to see the level of professionalism, it is tremendous,\u201d Stott said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t 60 years ago with the Apollo program. Apollo flight computers, they had 2 kilobytes of RAM and they had 36 kilobytes of storage. Here we are on this mission, flying 1 Gigabyte of RAM and 8 terabytes of storage with Phison Pascari. It\u2019s tremendous.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n