# Google Research — A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

- Company: Google Research (research.google)
- Announced: 2026-06-12T17:37:00+00:00
- Category: research-paper
- Subject: Research
- Source: https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform-from-your-retired-phones/
- Record: https://forck.live/items/1333-a-low-carbon-computing-platform-from-your-retired-phones

Researchers at UC San Diego, with Google support, are building a low-carbon computing platform by repurposing retired Pixel smartphones into a datacenter cluster. The project aims to reduce embodied carbon by reusing smartphone motherboards, which account for about 50% of a phone's carbon footprint. The cluster will use containerized applications managed by Kubernetes and is planned to support university computer science classes.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform-from-your-retired-phones/:

> researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a pathway for the second life of phones through the exploration of “phone cluster computing.” This is a process whereby the motherboards of retired smartphones are extracted, collected into clusters, and redeployed as a general-purpose computing platform.

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