HPE's Spaceborne Computer-4 (SBC4) is scheduled to land on the Moon aboard Astrolab's FLIP rover as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Both sources agree the mission will touch down near the Moon's south pole in late 2026, carried by Voyager Technologies' Griffin-1 lander. Once deployed, SBC4 will run AI workloads including retrieval-augmented generation, vision inference, and LiDAR data processing for mapping and navigation.
The system is compact, fanless, and cooled by a space radiator because the Moon has no air. Both sources emphasize that SBC4 is built largely from commercial off-the-shelf parts, particularly Kioxia M.2 SSDs. The Register describes a mirrored pair of Kioxia drives totaling 1TB, protected by software RAID 1, while ServeTheHome mentions a single Kioxia BG-series M.2 SSD of the same class used in low-cost PCs. HPE's Mark Fernandez told The Register that after nine years of ISS experience, no special space-grade storage is needed.
The two outlets differ on the compute hardware. ServeTheHome states SBC4 has a low-power CPU and GPU, while The Register says the silicon remains a mystery, with the partner not wanting to be named in case of failure. The Register also reports that SBC4 will run HPL and HPCG benchmarks, potentially producing the first Top500 submission from a celestial body; ServeTheHome only mentions "the first HPC benchmark on the lunar surface" without naming the benchmarks.
Both sources frame the mission as a test of whether commercial hardware can support a lunar economy. The Register emphasizes software-based "hardware hardening," where SBC4 monitors its own metrics and throttles or powers down if thresholds are exceeded. ServeTheHome adds that NASA and Deloitte will deploy additional workloads, including NASA's FLUID federated learning experiment and Deloitte's Silent Shield cyber-analytics.