tl;dr: UC San Diego, with Google's support, is building a 2,000-phone datacenter from retired Pixel smartphones to cut the embodied carbon of computing hardware. The process strips phones down to motherboards (which account for ~50% of embodied carbon), replaces Android's userspace with a general-purpose Linux distro, and orchestrates 25-50 devices per cluster via Kubernetes to approximate a server. Targeted at university workloads like Jupyter notebooks and autograders, the system is expected to launch in Fall 2026 and will also serve as a reliability testbed for consumer hardware at scale.