Google wants to use your old phone to power a data center

Scaling up to a bigger, 2,000-phone cluster will make it possible for hundreds of students to use this platform. Google says that this system equals "50 server-equivalents worth of compute at a fraction of the usual cost."

The full system is expected to launch in Fall 2026.

It's more complex than just wiring some phones together

The process is a bit more complex than slapping hundreds of phones together. The researchers removed all components, including the displays, cameras, and batteries, to leave just the barebone motherboard of the Pixels.

These "naked" motherboards are then connected in a network and programmed using Linux to run a real computational load. The software side of things is not particularly hard, as Android is Linux-based at its core.

According to Google, modern smartphones are on par with or even better than some servers when it comes to single-core performance, and creating a server cluster using smartphones can absolutely replace some purpose-built server machines.

Why are we turning old phones into data centers?

Well, the short answer is AI. The long answer is also AI but in more words. The demand for AI services has been skyrocketing in the past year, and Google recently announced a $80-billion investment in scaling its infrastructure.

And it's not just Google that's placing a huge bet on AI. Other companies have locked hundreds of billions of dollars into datacenters, hoping that when AI becomes mainstream, these investments will pay off.

This would require a lot of paid subscriptions for Google AI and Gemini, and unsurprisingly, Google lowered the price for the base Google AI services in an attempt to score new subscribers.

In the aforementioned press release Google admits that this little research serves as a testbed for the scalability of the idea, meaning we could see huge phone computing clusters in the future.

Using old phones is actually pretty clever, as these devices normally end up in the carbon footprint statistics more than anything else.

What does it mean for you and me?

Not much, at this point in time. It's a pilot program, and don't expect anything of consequence anytime soon. Prices of old phones won't be affected, and most companies already have policies to trade or buy old phones back.

What could change in the long run is the hardware crisis we're in. RAM and graphics cards are super expensive and this AI demand makes everything that uses computational power more and more expensive, including phones, laptops, gaming consoles, etc.

Using old phones for small and cheap data centers could potentially offset part of the load and help manufacturers catch up. Fingers crossed.