On Wednesday, the semiconductor and storage business Phison and the data storage and resilience company Lonestar launched a data center infrastructure aboard a SpaceX rocket bound for the moon.
The businesses are loading Lonestar’s clients’ data onto a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that is scheduled to land on March 4 with Phison’s Pascari storage, which are solid state drives (SSDs) designed for data centers. This is the start of the first-ever lunar data center, which the firms intend to grow until it can accommodate a petabyte of storage.
The idea to construct a data center in space was first conceived in 2018, years before the current AI-driven spike in demand for data centers, according to Chris Stott, the founder, chair, and CEO of Lonestar, who spoke with TechCrunch. According to him, clients were looking for methods to store their data off of Earth so that it would be safe from threats like hackers and natural disasters.
Stott also said
“Humanity’s most precious item, outside of us, is data,”. “They see data as the new oil. I’d say it’s more precious than that.”
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’s Perseverance Rover on Mars. The company also offers a design service called Imagine Plus, which develops custom storage solutions for unique projects.
They told TechCrunch
“We were very excited when there’s a call from Chris,” Michael Wu, the general manager and president of Phison, “We took a standard product and were able to customize whatever they needed for these products and we launched it. So it’s a very exciting journey.”
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 — it can’t easily be fixed if an issue arises.
Stott also said, “[This is] why SSDs are so important,”. “No moving parts. It’s remarkable technology that’s allowing us to do what we’re doing for these governments and hopefully almost every government in the world as we go forward and almost every company and corporation.”
According to Stott, the corporation successfully carried out a test launch in early 2024, and the technology has been ready for launch since 2023.
The launch on Wednesday contained a variety of customer data, from a space agency testing a huge language model to several nations interested in catastrophe recovery. Imagine Dragons even sent a music video for one of their songs from the Starfield space game soundtrack as part of the activity.
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