Google, in collaboration with UC San Diego, is converting old smartphones into mini data centers. Its aim is to reduce e-waste and extend the life of hardware. These clusters will be for small-to-medium computing tasks, not for large AI models.
Tech News: Google, one of the world’s largest tech companies, is now working on a new project. In this project, old smartphones lying idle will be converted into mini data centres. The objective of this research is to reduce e-waste (electronic waste) and increase the life of existing hardware. Google is working on this idea in collaboration with researchers from America’s University of California San Diego (UC San Diego). The plan is to create a computing cluster of about 2,000 phones using motherboards from old Pixel smartphones.
Under this project, parts like screen, battery, camera and outer cover will be removed from unused smartphones. After this, only the motherboard will be kept, which contains the processor, memory and storage. These motherboards will be interconnected. These clusters will work using Linux based operating system and Kubernetes management platform.
According to Google, a cluster of 25 to 50 smartphones can provide as much performance as a modern server for certain tasks. When hundreds or thousands of phones work together, they will be able to handle even large cloud services.
However, Google has also made it clear that this system will not be a substitute for Nvidia’s powerful AI servers. That is, they will not replace the powerful GPU infrastructure used to train large artificial intelligence models like Gemini. Instead, they will be used primarily for small- and medium-scale computing purposes, such as educational institutions, research projects, web services, cloud-based development platforms, and Jupyter notebook environments.
Usually people change their smartphones every four years. Google believes that in such a situation, reusing the phone’s functional processor, memory and other parts will help in reducing carbon emissions from manufacturing. If this project is successful, it could pave the way for eco-friendly data centers in the future and could also become a practical solution to the problem of e-waste.