Google and UC San Diego researchers are creating a data center using 2,000 recycled Pixel smartphones, launching this fall. They remove screens and batteries, using only the motherboards clustered into a computing platform.

The project runs a Linux server distro on Android hardware, turning each phone into a small server. Some smartphone cores outperform traditional server cores in benchmarks, but limited memory and I/O restrict tasks.

A 20-phone cluster handled 75+ students’ workloads faster than a standard AWS backend. The full cluster aims to deliver about 50 servers at a fraction of typical costs. Reliability remains a key concern since phones aren’t built for continuous heavy use.