Your old Google Pixel smartphone could be reused in a data center

Tech news has been getting darker and darker lately. As RAMaggedon continues to slash prices on virtually every gadget (and many of us panic-buy PCs), it’s refreshing to see feel-good stories coming in. Take part in a project designed to reduce electronic waste caused by discarded phones. Researchers at the University of San Diego are trying to help schools and students by studying whether old Google Pixel phones can be repurposed as affordable computing clusters.

As noted in a Google Search blog and first reported by Tom’s materialResearchers have teamed up with Google to repurpose a number of discarded Pixel phones to take advantage of their computing benefits. Despite the aging technology in these devices, their motherboards are still powerful enough to support small-scale data centers, which could save schools a lot of money in the future.

The Google Pixel phone repurposing project was undertaken, in part, to reduce the carbon footprint left by discarded devices. Even after being thrown away, many old phones still retain significant computing capacity. That’s why this project explores “telephone cluster computing,” as Google Research puts it. This process involves removing older Pixel models from all components except the motherboard. Once the display, battery, case and speakers are discarded, the motherboard is placed in a cluster and then transformed into a “general purpose computing platform,” according to Google’s blog. Interestingly, a Pixel’s motherboard is responsible for 50% of its carbon footprint, according to these Google sustainability reports.

If you’re a Google Pixel owner who’s currently watching that hot pink Pixel 11 leak and hoping it’s real, you might take comfort in the fact that your old phone could one day help students. Researchers found that a group of 20 Pixel motherboards can support educational applications that can serve a class of more than 75 students. The end of the project is much more ambitious, with the planned goal of providing a 2,000-person telephone computing cluster that can support around 100 classes of similar size at a time. The system is expected to launch this fall. If successful, the researchers believe it could provide schools with affordable access to computing resources, which would be much cheaper than building new infrastructure.

This Pixel reuse project also provided some interesting insights into the power of aging phones. While the researchers’ main goal was to create a low-carbon cloud computing platform for schools, they discovered in doing so, semi-recent Pixel models could actually match modern servers. Take the Google Pixel Fold of 2023. Via SPEC benchmarks, researchers say the Fold’s single-threaded performance often exceeds that of a server like the ASUS RS720-E11. On a larger scale, Google Research claims that the single-threaded performance of many modern smartphones is comparable to that of modern multi-core servers.

What these researchers are doing in San Diego is clearly an admirable achievement. This is also an important question. Discarded phones have a significant impact on e-waste globally, and projects like the one undertaken in California can help reduce their harmful carbon footprint. This may not be a question that regularly crosses your mind, but if you regularly replace your smartphone and then fail to dispose of your old one responsibly, you’re harming the environment.

According to Google Research, the average smartphone user replaces their device every four years. This rapid upgrade cycle leads to the destruction of millions of phones each year. Discarded phones generate environmental waste when their valuable materials (such as copper and silver) are not reused, forcing suppliers to unnecessarily mine new ones.

Phones can also produce hazardous waste. The lithium-ion battery in your average Google Pixel can be harmful to the environment if not disposed of properly. If you want to help the planet, keep your current phone for a few more years if it still works well. And when it’s time to replace it, try either recycling your phone or seeing if you can resell/return it to the manufacturer.