Old Pixel phones turned into mini data centers by Google and UCSD

Researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), in collaboration with Google, have repurposed old Pixel smartphones into a distributed computing platform that functions as a small local data center. The project aims to give retired phones a second life as a general-purpose computing platform, addressing electronic waste from frequent phone upgrades. According to the research, even a three-year-old phone's single-core performance can exceed that of some servers used in top-tier data centers, though overall server performance remains higher.