A datacenter is built from two thousand retired phones

Claim

Google and UC San Diego are building a low-carbon data center from 2,000 retired Pixel phones, drafting dead hardware into cognition, while Ajinomoto, the monosodium glutamate maker that controls the film insulating every advanced chip, said it will not gouge on price.

Reported metric: 2,000 phones

Reporting date: 2026-06-14 (not necessarily the event date)

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

• Welcome to June 14, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)