Google and UCSD Build Low-Carbon Data Center From 2,000 Retired Pixel Phones, Equivalent to 50 Servers

According to Beating, Google researchers and UC San Diego have launched a phone cluster computing project to repurpose 2,000 retired Pixel smartphone mainboards into a low-carbon data center. The system removes screens, batteries, casings, and cameras from old phones, retaining only mainboards where most embodied carbon emissions originate.

In early experiments, a 20-phone cluster successfully handled 75+ students submitting assignments for parallel computing courses with sub-50-second processing times, outperforming AWS instances. The full 2,000-phone system, equivalent to approximately 50 traditional servers, is scheduled to launch in autumn 2026 and will support hundreds of systems programming and parallel computing courses while serving as a long-term reliability testing platform.