Data storage and resilience companies Lonestar and Semiconductor and Storage Company Phison launched data center infrastructure at SpaceX rockets on Wednesday.
Companies are packing Phison’s Pascari Storage (Solid State Drives (SSDS)) built for data centers to land on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set on March 4th.
Lonestar founder, chair and CEO Chris Stott told TechCrunch that the idea of building a data center in space was born in 2018, years before the current AI-driven surge in data center demand. He said he is immune from things like climate disasters and hacking as customers are looking for ways to store data from the planet.
“The most valuable item of humanity outside of us is data,” Stott said. “They see data as a new oil. I think it’s even more valuable than that.”
Stott said partnering with Phison to build a space data center is a natural choice. Phison already offers storage solutions for space missions through MARS’ NASA’s Perseverance Rover. The company also offers a design service called Imagine Plus, which develops custom storage solutions for unique projects.
“We were very excited when we got the call from Chris,” Fyson’s general manager and president Michael Wu told TechCrunch. “We have adopted standard products and we can customize what we need for these products and we launched it. It’s a very exciting journey.”
Lonestar partnered with Phison in 2021 and has since developed an SSD storage unit designed for space. Stott added that companies spent years testing their products prior to their initial launch, as their technology must be solid. If a problem occurs, it cannot be easily fixed.
“(This) why SSDs are so important,” Stott said. “There are no moving parts. It’s an incredible technology to allow us to do what we’re doing for these governments, and hopefully it allows us to do just about every government in the world when we move forward and for almost every company and business.”
Stott said the technology has been ready to be released since 2023, and the company successfully conducted a test launch in early 2024.
Wednesday’s launch included a wide variety of customer data, ranging from multiple governments interested in disaster recovery to space agencies testing large-scale language models. The band also featured the dragons and sent out a music video of one of the songs from the Starfield Space game’s soundtrack.
Lonestar is not the only company aiming to bring data centers into space. Another candidate, Lumen Orbit, appeared in the Y Combinator’s summer 2024 batch. The startup has acquired one of the most talked about seed rounds from its YC cohort, raising more than $21 million and rebranded it as StarCloud.
As the AI-driven demand for hardware accelerates, more companies may pursue space-based storage solutions that provide near-limiting storage capacity and solar energy.
In the case of Lonestar, if everything goes well, the company will work with satellite maker Sidus Space to build six data storage spacecraft scheduled to be released between 2027 and 2030.
“It’s fascinating to see the level of professionalism. It’s incredible,” Stott said. “This isn’t 60 years ago with the Apollo program. On the Apollo flight computer, there was 2 kilobytes of RAM and 36 kilobytes of storage. Here we’re taking part in this mission, flying 1 gigabyte of RAM and 8 terabytes of storage in the Phison Pascari. That’s incredible.”