"When I look into what your company does, it kinda sounds fake," the host told Chris Stott a few minutes into a recent podcast. Stott did not argue. "The best ideas come out of the most outlandish crazy things," he answered. "We put data in space. We protect companies, countries, we back up data. No more libraries of Alexandria."

His company, Lonestar Data Holdings, has flown data storage to the surface of the moon twice, on Intuitive Machines landers launched by SpaceX under NASA's commercial lunar program. The first, in February 2024, was the first American soft landing on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. "The whole idea is to take your data, your most valuable asset in the world today, and keep it safe somewhere else," Stott, founder and executive chairman of Lonestar, said on the On The Margin podcast.

For years that pitch read as a novelty. Then, before dawn on March 1, Iranian drones hit Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates, with a facility in Bahrain also damaged. AWS’s own status page confirmed objects struck its Middle East site and started a fire. Dozens of cloud services went dark for the better part of a day, impacting various crypto and financial services companies. The affected regions were still degraded months later, with Amazon telling customers repairs would take months and advising them to move workloads out and restore from remote backups. Analysts at Georgia Tech and the Royal United Services Institute called it the first time a state had deliberately targeted commercial cloud infrastructure in a war.

'Data centers became an actual target'

Stott watched it land on his thesis. "The Iranians physically targeted data centers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi on those days and blew them up with drones," he said. "This wasn't just, I'm gonna attack you or hack you." For him, "data centers became an actual target." He is not a neutral narrator, and he mislabels the hit cities (the confirmed damage was across the UAE, with Bahrain also affected). But the core event is real, and it reframed a company that had spent most of its life in stealth.

The sales logic is a single rhetorical question. "Do you give them all point defense, missile defense, optical laser, the directed energy weapons, cover them in fishing nets? No," Stott said. "Or do you store the data in space as a backup? Nice and safe." His phrase for it is a step past the industry’s usual air-gapped offline copy. Keeping a copy off the planet, he says, is a way of preserving civilization by putting it where no rival can reach it. "We’re vacuum-gapped, not just air-gapped," he said.

Similar concerns have been raised by OG bitcoin miner Chun Wang, who has been championing mining bitcoin in space and has since been to space on the first commercial SpaceX flight.

'How do you defend that?'

The reason anyone will hear him out now is the scale of what is being built on the ground. The artificial-intelligence boom has turned data centers into some of the largest and most power-hungry structures on the planet, and the people supplying the hardware describe demand that outruns the grid. "Bitcoin mining takes care of the floating load. So you can get cheap power from the grid. But AI HPC is where the money is," Leo Wang, VP of capital markets at chipmaker Canaan, said on the On The Margin podcast. "You can't live with one without the other."

Stott points at the biggest of those projects. Meta is building a Louisiana campus, Hyperion , that the company says will draw five gigawatts and which Mark Zuckerberg has compared to the footprint of Manhattan. "How do you defend that?" Stott said. "Do you put rockets around it?" His answer is to copy nothing terrestrial and store the data 240,000 miles away instead. As his wife, retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, puts it to him: the moon is so well placed for data storage that if it were not there, you would have to build it.

Lonestar's track record is more mixed than the pitch. Its 2024 payload, "Independence," stored a copy of data for the State of Florida and beamed the Declaration of Independence to the lunar surface, a proof of concept. But the Intuitive Machines lander tipped onto its side. "The lander fell over," Stott said, but because "we're a computer," the payload kept running. "So we were happy." A second mission in March 2025 carried an eight-terabyte "Freedom" unit; that lander also came down wrong and lost power within a day, a harder failure than the first. Stott frames both as test articles that did their job before the hardware quit.

He is also not alone in the sky. Nvidia-backed Starcloud put an H100 chip in orbit in 2025 and is valued above a billion dollars; Google's Project Suncatcher plans to fly its own AI chips on satellites; and SpaceX has filed for up to a million data-center satellites. Most of those rivals are chasing orbital compute for training models. Stott, who says the physics of cooling giant GPU racks in space is still unsolved, is deliberately staying narrow. "That's why we're not doing the big training models, the big racks of GPUs," he said. Lonestar sells storage plus light "inference," and what he calls sovereign language models, with the next missions, he says, carrying Nvidia chips and half a petabyte of storage each into Earth orbit.

The deeper argument is about who controls where data physically sits , an anxiety that predates the drones. "If the code is open but the data takes a server farm to store it and you need a hyperscaler server farm to use it, the fact that the code is open doesn't help that much," Ben Goertzel, founder of decentralized-AI project SingularityNET, said on the On The Margin podcast. That is the market Lonestar is selling into: governments and companies that want a copy of their most sensitive records somewhere no rival power can seize. Its named customers are the State of Florida, the Isle of Man (which stored digital copies of its postage stamps as a sovereignty trial) and, through the Mexican data-center operator KIO Networks, a set of Latin American governments. Stott says the pipeline exceeds $800 million, a figure that is his alone and cannot be independently checked.

Skeptics have plenty to work with: two failed landings, an unproven business model, and costs that dwarf a terrestrial backup. The resilience case, though, is not eccentric. Concentrating anything valuable in one place is exactly the vulnerability the security industry keeps relearning. "What's a bit unfortunate about it is that attackers understood that before infrastructure teams and before security teams," Ido Sofer, founder of crypto-security firm Sodot, said on the On The Margin podcast. The same logic that argues for splitting private keys across locations argues for splitting data across orbits.

Stott, who angel-funded Lonestar himself before Scout Ventures led a seed round and Atypical Ventures led a $6.6 million raise in January, says the hardest sell was the first one. "Imagine going to a room and saying, hey, I want to put data centers on the moon, please give me money," he said. "They did. They saw it too." His mental model for the destination is less a frontier than a vault. "The moon is a giant spaceship. It's a space station," he said. "You don't live on it, you live in it."