A great new lease of life for your old smartphone? Google teams up with university researchers to create low-cost data centers out of 2,000 old Pixel phones

Three people talking together, two of them using their phones.

• Old Pixel phones are being rebuilt into low-cost computing clusters
• Researchers stripped smartphones down to motherboards and deployed Linux
• Twenty retired phones can support applications used by 75 students

Millions of discarded smartphones are added to the global electronic waste stream every year despite retaining substantial computing capability.