Researchers recycle old phones and cluster them into ‘computing platforms’ that operate as a low-cost data center — says processors on modern smartphones deliver higher single-core performance than comparable multicore servers

Old phones stacked together.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) collaborated with Google to recycle “old” Pixel smartphones and give them a second life as a low-cost data center. According to Google Research, retired smartphones are part of the “embodied carbon” that is associated with manufacturing and its carbon footprint. In fact, humanity’s penchant for mobile devices and replacing them every few years is one of the biggest contributors to e-waste, so the group from UCSD planned to give these discarded devices a second life as a “general-purpose computing platform.”

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