Decentralized AI networks want to turn everyday phones into an alternative to centralized computing infrastructure — but skeptics have their doubts.

The sprawling data centers that underpin the AI revolution have become about as popular as baby toys made from asbestos.

Campaigners around the world highlight the massive amounts of energy and water the infrastructure requires, while markets worry about the revenue required to pay back the $38 billion cost of building a single, one-gigawatt AI data center.

But is there another way to power the AI revolution that’s sitting in your pocket right now?

As of October 2026, there are an estimated 7.68 billion mobile connections worldwide, and billions of smartphones are currently lying unused in pockets, on desks and in drawers.

Each one has a processor, memory and an internet connection, and represent a vast pool of computing power just waiting to be put to work.

So could a network of humble smartphones realistically power AI at scale?

Putting smartphones to work

Decentralized AI networks are emerging that aim to turn everyday smartphones into a distributed infrastructure layer, and reduce reliance on costly, centralized data centers.

Acurast says it has onboarded more than 335,000 smartphones to its network. Co-founder Alessandro De Carli says that around 40,000 of those are fully active on an average day, providing computing capacity for tasks ranging from web scraping and cybersecurity to AI inference and agent hosting.

Data center locations across the US. Source: World Resources Institute

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He says smartphones are particularly efficient for certain workloads. Their built-in hardware security features “excel” in areas like confidential computing or an “isolated environment” that can install and run executables. They are also well suited to workloads that are “CPU intensive,” or which require wide distribution and “unfiltered access” to the internet,

“Servers are better at multi-threading, but smartphones offer unmatched compute efficiency,” De Carli tells Magazine.

While ordinary smartphones have limited memory, and big servers retain an advantage when handling multiple tasks in parallel, he says many workloads can still fit within the memory available.

Taken as a whole, the active phones on the network “match the compute capacity of about 2,340 high-end data-center servers,” he claims, benchmarked against the ASUS RS720A-E11, a high-density server built for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC).

Mobile connectivity in 2026. Source: Datareportal

Another project, Phase, launched Phase Proxy in October, which allows smartphone owners to provide internet connectivity and blockchain validation for AI agents. Founder Kirill Eves explains that, “websites routinely block or rate-limit automated traffic originating from data centers,” so the system employs users’ mobile and residential connections as a proxy instead. Phase plans to charge 0.5 USDT per 1,000 requests and 1GB of traffic.

The next step is Phase Router which will direct simpler requests to models running on phones in the network, or route them instead to major external providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, based on “task complexity, model capabilities, performance and cost.”

The network could eventually expand beyond smartphones to desktops, servers and GPUs, he says.

But Markus Levin, co-founder of decentralized infrastructure provider XYO, says decentralized networks may be better suited to collecting and verifying real-world data rather than running AI models.

Phones and sensors can provide localized information that centralized datasets miss, he says, but only if the data is accurate and resistant to manipulation.

“A useful decentralized AI network should be judged by whether it solves a problem customers will pay to fix, not by its token price or node count,” he says.

Coordination is the tricky part

One of the biggest challenges with mobile phone networks is coordinating the devices to provide predictable hardware, power and connectivity, in the same way data centers do.

A 2025 study tested small groups of smartphones carrying out image recognition tasks and found that clusters of phones could deliver competitive performance in certain conditions, but the results came from a controlled testing environment.

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A Google-backed project at the University of California, San Diego found that a cluster of 20 retired smartphones could handle the peak computing workload of a class of more than 75 students, with grading times faster than the university’s standard cloud setup. However, those devices were also organized in a controlled environment, not scattered across the world.

In the real world, a distributed network has to contend with phones that disconnect, overheat, run out of battery, change networks, and have varying amounts of processing power and memory.

In a blockchain network like Ethereum for example, the capacity is currently limited by how long it takes to communicate across the network, and the processing abilities of the lowest spec devices.

20 retired smartphones could handle a class of more than 75 students. Source: Google Research

Similarly, when tasks are split between several phones, slow connections or disconnected devices can throw a spanner in the works. Distributing separate, independent tasks across available phones is generally more straightforward.

Can the economics work?

Even if the technical challenges can be overcome, networks still need to make financial sense for customers and device owners alike.

Using existing smartphone hardware doesn’t incur the high capital costs of building a data center, but costs include factors like connectivity, coordination and incentives for people on the network.

When it comes to compensation, De Carli says there is “no fixed figure” because rewards for Acurast participants vary by “device uptime, hardware specifications (benchmark performance), total ACU staked and active compute demand” from developers. He says operators compete for a pool of inflation-funded rewards, rather than receiving direct payments from customers.

Phase network rewards depend on uptime, participation and customer demand.

“Phase will use a portion of its service revenue to purchase PHASE on the open market and distribute it to node operators based on their contributions to the network,” Eves says.

Running an AI model to run properly on a phone is no longer the main challenge — getting the economics to stack up while coordinating tens of thousands of phones to behave like a reliable cloud service is the real trick.

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