Google and researchers at the University of California San Diego have unveiled a project called "phone cluster computing", which repurposes retired smartphones as low-carbon cloud servers rather than discarding them as electronic waste. The scheme matters because the AI boom is driving soaring demand for computing power, chips, electricity and cooling, while billions of phones fall out of use worldwide; reusing existing hardware could help meet some of that demand while cutting the environmental cost of manufacturing new servers.

According to the article, UC San Diego plans to launch a data centre built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones in autumn 2026, aimed at providing low-cost cloud computing for students and research workloads. Each phone is stripped down to its motherboard — which holds the processor, memory and storage — while the battery, screen, cameras and chassis are removed for safety and space reasons, and a general-purpose Linux system is loaded so the boards can be grouped into clusters that work like tiny servers. The project focuses on "embodied carbon", the emissions generated through mining, manufacturing and shipping before a device is even switched on, and Google says the motherboard accounts for roughly half of a phone's embodied carbon, making it the most valuable part to recover.