Caching cloned data from one run of the pipeline for the next

I have a project configured with the attached ci script.gitlab-ci.yml

Before running the pipeline I clone the code from the project and data from another gitlab project. The data is big and read only.

This works well, but the cloning of the data takes a long time and delays the pipeline for many minutes.

Is there a way to keep the data available in a cache so that consecutive pipeline runs can reuse the data?