4:56 PM PST · February 26, 2025 Data storage and resilience company Lonestar and semiconductor and storage company Phison launched a data center infrastructure on a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday that’s headed to the moon. The companies are sending Phison’s Pascari storage — solid state drives (SSDs) built for data centers — packed with Lonestar’s clients’ 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. 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 — years 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. “Humanity’s most precious item, outside of us, is data,” Stott said. “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. “We were very excited when there’s a call from Chris,” Michael Wu, the general manager and president of Phison, told TechCrunch. “We took a standard product and were able to customize whatever they need 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. Techcrunch event