American startup built the first data center on the Moon

Lonestar Data Holdings plans to use SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to launch the fully assembled data center, Interesting Engineering reported on January 22. The small data center, named Freedom, is expected to fly with the lunar lander of American company Intuitive Machines in February.

According to Lonestar Data Holdings’ website, this is the first physical data center to fly off Earth. Hub is not intended for applications that require immediate data access. Instead, it prioritizes the safe and long-term storage of important information. Lonestar Data Holdings has signed contracts with a number of customers, including the state of Florida, the Isle of Man, AI company Valkyrie and pop-rock band Imagine Dragons.

Freedom uses solar energy and naturally cooled SSD hard drives, helping to increase sustainability and environmental friendliness. The data center on the Moon will have a backup copy on the ground at Flexential’s facility in Tampa, Florida.

Lonestar Data Holdings believes that storing important data on the Moon has many advantages. First, the center is extremely safe from natural disasters, cyber attacks and geopolitical instability on Earth. Second, it has less impact on the environment than large-scale data centers, which consume a lot of energy.

Previously, Lonestar Data Holdings also achieved some progress with this ambitious goal. The company cooperated with Space Florida and Intuitive Machines to successfully conduct the first full data storage test from the lunar surface in February 2024. In 2021, they successfully tested data center technology in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS).

The process of building and maintaining data centers on the Moon poses major challenges related to high costs, harsh environments, and difficulty in repair and upgrading. However, the potential benefits are huge, especially in protecting valuable data for future generations.

Establishing a data center on the Moon would also benefit NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. It could help store and process large amounts of scientific data from Artemis missions.

Several other companies are also actively developing space data centers. For example, American company Lumen Orbit just raised $11 million in capital, with a company valuation of $40 million, showing the confidence of investors in the space data center market.