Google supports UC San Diego's low-carbon compute platform built from 2,000 retired Pixel phones
A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones
What happened
With Google's support, UC San Diego is using motherboards from 2,000 retired Pixel phones to build a data center offering low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing for hundreds of students and faculty. SPEC benchmarks show that 25–50 phones roughly equal one modern server; the phones are organized into self-managing Kubernetes clusters of 25–50 devices. The system is expected to launch in fall 2026.
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