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Old Phones Get New Life as Data Centers
15 Jun
Summary
- Retired smartphones are being repurposed into functional computing clusters.
- These phone data centers offer low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing solutions.
- The technology aims to reduce electronic waste and manufacturing emissions.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a novel approach to computing by wiring retired smartphones into low-cost data centers, a concept they term "phone cluster computing." This process involves stripping down obsolete phones to their motherboards and networking them to perform real computational tasks.
This innovation arrives at a time when demand for AI services is driving unprecedented data center construction, alongside a global increase in electronic waste. The UC San Diego team plans to scale up their project to a data center comprising approximately 2,000 retired Pixel phones, expected to launch in Fall 2026. This initiative aims to provide hundreds of students and researchers with affordable, low-carbon cloud computing.
While these smartphone clusters will not replace large-scale facilities for training frontier AI models, they are envisioned for smaller workloads, educational research, and edge computing. Previous experiments, such as those from the University of Tartu, have demonstrated the feasibility of repurposing old phones into data centers for around 8 euros per device.
