Google Research· Research

A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

Jennifer Switzer, Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher, and David Patterson, Fellow, Google With support from Google, Researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a useful second-life for consumer smartphones. The carbon footprint of computing is a key sustainability challenge. It is driven by two major sources: operational carbon reflects emissions from energy consumed during use, and embodied carbon encompasses emissions associated with hardware manufacturing. While operational carbon is often addressed with efforts such as improved energy efficiency and using clean energy, the manufacturing footprint represents a more complex hurdle. To address this, 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. …

Announced

12 Jun 2026 17:37 UTC