Data storage and elastic companies Lonestar and semiconductor and storage companies Fisen Data center infrastructure was launched on the SpaceX rocket on Wednesday, which headed to the moon.
The two companies are sending to Phison’s Pascari Storage, a solid-state drive (SSD) built for data centers, containing data from Lonestar customers on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that landed on March 4. This marks the beginning of the first ever Lunar Data Center, the first ever company that plans to expand in the future until the Petabyte holding the storage.
Chris Stott, founder, chairman and CEO of Lonestar, told TechCrunch that the idea of building data centers in space began in 2018, years before the current surge in demand for AI-driven data centers. He said customers are looking for ways to store data on Earth so it can be protected from climate disasters and hacking, etc.
“The most precious thing for humans is data,” Stott said. “They see data as new oil. I would say it’s more precious than this.”
Stott said it was a natural choice to work with Phison to build a spatial data center. Phison has already provided storage solutions for space missions through NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars. The company also offers a design service called Imagine Plus, which develops custom storage solutions for unique projects.
“We were so excited when Chris called,” Phison General Manager and President Michael Wu told TechCrunch. “We took standard products and were able to customize everything that needed for those products, and then we launched it. So it was a very exciting journey.”
Lonestar collaborated with Phison in 2021 and since then, they have been developing SSD storage units designed for space. Stott added that the two companies spent years testing the product before it was first launched because the technology had to be solid – if something went wrong, it wouldn’t be easy to solve.
“[This is] Why SSDs are so important,” Stott said. “There are no moving parts. This is outstanding technology, which enables us to do what we are doing for these governments and hope that as we move forward and nearly every company and company grows, almost every government in the world. ”
Stott said the technology has been ready since 2023, with the company successfully testing and launching in early 2024.
Wednesday’s release includes various types of customer data, from multiple governments interested in disaster recovery to space agencies testing large language models. Even the band imagined dragons attended the conference, sending music videos from the Starfield Space game soundtrack.
Lonestar isn’t the only company looking to bring data centers into space. Another competitor, Lumen Orbit, appeared in Y Combinator’s summer 2024 batch. The startup got one of them The most buzzing seed bullet More than raised from that YC queue $21 million and rebrand as StarCloud.
As AI-powered demand for hardware accelerates, it is likely that more companies will be seen pursuing space-based storage solutions that offer almost unlimited storage capacity and solar energy, thus, there is an advantage that Earth’s data center cannot match.
For Lonestar, if all goes well, the company plans to build six data storage spacecraft with satellite maker Sidus Space, which is expected to launch between 2027 and 2030.
“It’s fascinating to see the professional level, it’s huge,” Stott said. “This is not the Apollo project 60 years ago. Apollo flying computers, they have 2,000 containers of RAM and 36,000 seats of storage. Here we’re doing this mission, flying 1 GB of RAM and 8 TB of storage with Phison Pascari. It’s huge.”
