One night in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a felting artisan ended her day with a prayer. May our partners have good health. May they be ambitious, and successful, and may their businesses grow. The next morning, sisters-in-law Chinara Makashova and Nazgul Esenbaeva, and the people they worked with awoke to what seemed like a miracle: Shopify orders. So many Shopify orders.
Technology
Wool, water, Wi-Fi: Modernizing an ancient business at the final frontiers of e-commerce
They got to work. It felt like everything was falling into place: The company they had built from scratch was exporting felted slippers and artisan products to wholesale partners around the globe. And with help from USAID’s green business initiative in Central Asia, they were expanding their production abilities — and finally building their own modern, direct-to-consumer web store: one with the payment processing and data security infrastructure to help them reach customers directly.
But just as their new ecommerce infrastructure was coming together, the USAID funding vanished around the world — leaving them with a $35,000 funding gap. In so many places, the internet makes building a retail business easy — but in the world’s most land-locked country, with a banking system bogged down by sanctions against one neighbor and cybersecurity barriers against another, growth is a balancing act. Tumar’s path has been unconventional: bringing together nomadic tradition, Soviet legacy, and digital commerce to build a modern business, even when the infrastructure around them can’t keep up. Their first challenge: scaling a 5,000-year-old process that had never before been automated, with machines salvaged from the collapse of the USSR.
For centuries, Kyrgyz nomads on the Eurasian steppe drove their flocks from the low green valleys to the snowy slopes of the Tian Shan mountains, sheared their sheeps’ lush thick wool, and used heat, water, and friction to felt it into the durable shyrdak blankets that lined their yurts. Felt may have been the world’s first-ever textile. It was strong, dense, and durable. It could stand up to bitter cold or pouring rain. But between industrialization and the pressure, under Soviet rule, to abandon the past, Kyrgyz wet felting by hand almost disappeared. In fact this particular felting tradition was just a few farflung elders and hidden artifacts from extinction in the 1990s when some women in Bishkek, graduating from university into a post-Soviet world, began to seek out, re-learn, and revive the practice.
Makashova and Esenbaeva — with help from Makashova’s aunt Roza — learned how to use this millennia-old technique of wet felting with Kyrgyz wool to make things like shyrdaks and kalpak hats. In 1998, they started Tumar Art Group. Within a decade, Tumar had its first wholesale partner. And in recent years, USAID-funded programs helped them share their knowledge with women throughout Central Asia, reviving an ancient industry while spurring a new economy.
On the felt factory floor
Today, Tumar’s Bishkek facility is a labyrinth of sunlit workspaces, some with pastel floor tiles, some with geraniums lining the windowsills, one full of old jelly jars and coffee containers full of pigments and dyes. Workers pull giant, fluffy sheets of “pre-felt” off the conveyor belt of a wool carding machine. On a switchboard that looks like a Cold War rocket launch interface, they toggle dials that are labeled in Chinese, with hand-scrawled Cyrillic translations taped above.
These days, modern, commercial felting operations use a water-free needle-felting process, Makashova explained. Some incorporate glue or synthetic fibers. But not here. Tumar’s engineering team hacked their way to avoiding all that, leveraging their custom manufacturing line to automate processes like carding (aligning the fibers), or kneading, done with a one-of-a-kind “beating machine.”
“We take care to keep our traditional technology of wet felting,” Makashova said. But “for the most complicated process of wet pressing, modern engineering does not offer machines, so we have to look for old Soviet schemes, adapt and make these machines ourselves — or restore old machines.”
To make one of their most in-demand products — felted slippers — they needed a heavy metal tub to hold water and heat, and flywheels that could apply consistent rhythmic pressure and agitation to the wool. An old Soviet wool milling machine would have done the trick. “Unfortunately,” Makashova said, “they are almost impossible to find.”
With scant financial resources and an economy in upheaval, it was hard for this start-up to find, acquire, and ship in the machines they needed — in part because some of those machines didn’t yet exist: Kyrgyz hand felting had never before been automated. Makashova’s brother, an automotive engineer, organized the group’s own small “mechanization base,” collecting, first, Soviet tools and metalworking machines. Gradually, the company acquired textile processing equipment from Italy, China, Russia, and beyond, salvaging, renovating, retrofitting, and Frankensteining equipment to bring automation to an ancient craft.
Then, more good fortune arrived: A Tumar associate found a tub and flywheels in “a heap of scrap metal intended for recycling,” Makashova recalled. The company’s engineering group restored the find, “and now we can’t imagine our work without these machines.”
As of the 2010s, Tumar was working more with wholesale partners around the world while continuing to make goods for their brick-and-mortar shop of the same name, on a sunny corner in central Bishkek, popular with tourists and expats.
By the late 2010s, the global market for sustainable, natural materials was on an upswing, and travelers coming through their Bishkek shop took notice, including a guy in Richmond, Virginia named Barclay Saul. He loved that you could see Tumar’s entire supply chain, from field to factory, in a day, and in the exploding landscape of eco-conscious “Instagram brands,” he and a partner decided to launch Kyrgies out of a Richmond storage space, and sell the slippers online.
In spring of 2020, when tourism came to a halt, Tumar’s bustling retail business did too. Saul’s bet was a smart one: Kyrgies’ sales surged. People were staying home — and they wanted the right footwear for it. But they also wanted natural materials. “This business has taught me simply that [people want to] buy less stuff, quality stuff,” Kyrgies CEO Saul said. Kyrgies’ ecommerce business has continued to double year over year, enabling Tumar to double its staff and scale their output fourfold in the past five years.
This is the dream, Chinara said — but there’s one dream they still haven’t been able to manifest in the reality of today’s complicated internet: their own web store. The sale of artisan goods out of the Bishkek storefront is still, in some ways, the most important thing they do, said Makashova. It’s just a quarter of their revenue, but it’s a source for their product innovation. Thanks to platforms like Shopify, Kyrgies could launch their retail business in the US virtually overnight. But for a Kyrgyzstan-based business, online retail is no easy feat. The cost of shipping by air or land from the heart of Central Asia is the first hurdle. And another thing: There’s no PayPal here. Payment systems, Makashova said, are “a very, very big problem.”
Still today, Kyrgyzstan’s banking system is closely tied to Russia’s, and Western sanctions put in place after Putin’s invasion of Crimea have made cross-border transactions tricky. Some Kyrgyz banks, wary of being blacklisted, have cut off connections to Russian-linked payment systems, and that’s left companies like Tumar in a lurch. Another wrinkle: With growing concerns over China’s access to US consumer data, platforms handling payments in countries near China — neighboring Kyrgyzstan included — are subject to serious cybersecurity hurdles. And if a payment doesn’t go through on the first attempt, often, there won’t be a second attempt. “We’ve lost many customers for this reason,” Esenbaeva said.
All this to say, Tumar’s old-school web store quickly became obsolete. They figured out they needed to rebuild their site with ISO 27001-compliant back-end infrastructure: encryption protocols, secure socket layers, and a payments gateway capable of navigating cross-border compliance from Central Asia, all in hopes of keeping international customers (and the cybersecurity platforms that protect them) from getting scared out of the purchase flow.
As of January 2025, the entire plan was in place. A new website was launched. They had the money in hand to build out the direct-sale infrastructure. But there was just one catch: The project was being financed by a green business grant from the now gutted and shuttered USAID.
Tumar is hoping that enrolling in Estonia’s e-Residency program will pull their plans for modern, global payment processing out of a death spiral — but they still have about a $35,000 international funding gap to fill with USAID’s dissolution.
On the outskirts of Bishkek, at Tumar’s new wool processing facility, the “break yurt” feels like a step back in time. Workers drink black tea and snack on puffy little squares of fried dough with clotted cream and jam. Right next door, a more modern scene unfolds: sun pours through the oculus in the yurt’s tunduk dome roof onto architectural drawings unfurled on a conference table. Shelves of binders and spiral-bound notebooks lean against the richly colored, shyrdak-lined walls. A flat-bed all-in-one printer, reminiscent of HP circa 2010 — whirs. A similar-vintage, thick-bezeled, matte-black computer monitor and keyboard set-up peeks out from piles of print-outs, a glue stick, an old calculator.
At this new factory, some 100 tons per year of course wool that would have been burned as waste is instead being cleaned and processed. More USAID green business support had been on the way — and it would’ve helped Tumar double the output. Now, they may be on their way to accomplishing that on their own, expanding their product line to include, for example, an entirely biodegradable slipper, and soundproofing and insulation panels (both “no-waste” products made, in part, from slipper scraps). And, importantly to the founders, reliable stocks of high quality raw material that other businesses across the region haven’t previously had access to. Across a stretch of grass from the side-by-side yurts, the warehouse is abuzz with activity.
“We want to open [up] possibilities [for] artisans to get new direct online orders,” and to learn how to maintain quality and consistency as output increases, Makashova said. And the only way they can do it is to keep growing.
There are workshops and small businesses across Central Asia waiting for this raw material to come their way, Esenbaeva said. That means—aside from their own production of felted goods—they’re needing to expand their partnerships with small, family-owned Kyrgyz sheep farms, and increase their capacity for processing wholesale felt. To make it all happen, they’ll need to keep collecting—and building—machines. Esenbaeva laughed, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “We are responsible for those we tame.”
Microsoft may once again be struggling to keep up with its own climate goals, according to its 2026 sustainability report. As reported by GeekWire, the report states that Microsoft’s carbon emissions increased 25 percent in 2025, totalling 34 million metric tons “without select interventions.” Microsoft says this was “driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure,” as well as the company’s decision last February to stop purchasing “non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates.”
Several years ago, Microsoft set itself a goal to be carbon negative by 2030, meaning it will need to remove more carbon emissions than it produces. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has faced setbacks toward accomplishing that goal, as its 2024 sustainability report showed a similar rise in climate pollution. This year’s report admits that, “While AI infrastructure is driving demand for energy, water, land, and materials, sustainability solutions are not scaling fast enough to meet demand.”
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That old phone sitting in your drawer may have more life left in it than you think. You may look at it and see a dead battery, an outdated camera or a screen that no longer feels worth using. Google and researchers at the University of California San Diego see something else: a tiny computer that may still have useful processing power.
Their idea is called phone cluster computing. Instead of treating retired smartphones as electronic waste, researchers remove the motherboard and redeploy it as part of a low-carbon computing system.
Google says UC San Diego plans to launch a data center built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones in fall 2026. The goal is to provide low-cost cloud computing for students and researchers while reducing the need for newly manufactured server hardware.
That means the next chapter for an old phone may not be a junk drawer. It may be a server rack.
YOU COULD GET PAID FROM GOOGLE’S ANDROID DATA LAWSUIT
Researchers plan to launch a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego in fall 2026 to support students and research workloads. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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What is phone cluster computing?
Phone cluster computing takes retired smartphones and turns their core hardware into a computing platform. The process starts by stripping each phone down to the motherboard. That board holds the processor, memory and storage. The display, battery, cameras, chassis and other phone-specific parts are removed.
That step is important because a full phone does not belong in a data center. Batteries can create safety issues. Screens and cameras waste space. The motherboard is the part that still offers computing value.
Once the board is removed, researchers load a general-purpose Linux system onto it. Android already runs on Linux at its core, but Android is built for mobile apps and personal devices. A data center needs something more flexible for cloud workloads. After that, the phone boards can be grouped into clusters. Many small boards then work together like a collection of tiny servers.
Why Google wants old Pixel phones for cloud computing
The AI boom has created a huge appetite for computing power. Data centers need more chips, more electricity and more cooling. At the same time, billions of phones fall out of use around the world.
This Google-backed project takes that conversation in a different direction by asking whether some useful computing can come from hardware we already made.
The project focuses on embodied carbon. That means the emissions created before a device ever turns on. Mining, manufacturing and shipping all add to that carbon footprint.
If a phone motherboard already exists, reusing it can avoid some of the environmental cost tied to manufacturing new hardware. Google says the motherboard accounts for about half of a phone’s embodied carbon, which makes it the most valuable part to recover.
How retired smartphones become low-carbon servers
You cannot plug a pile of old phones into a rack and call it a data center. The process requires careful teardown, new software and a way to manage many boards at once. Google says the project uses containerized applications managed by Kubernetes. That helps coordinate the work across many devices.
The phones are organized into self-managing clusters of about 25 to 50 boards. Each board works as a small Linux machine. Together, they can handle tasks that would otherwise run on traditional cloud servers. That does not make one phone equal to one server. A server has many more processor cores, more memory and data center-grade hardware. A phone board has fewer resources and tighter limits. Still, some jobs do not need a giant machine. They need enough compute to run efficiently without wasting resources.
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Google and UC San Diego are testing a cloud computing system built from retired Pixel phone motherboards, giving old smartphones a possible second life. (Google)
Can old phone processors handle cloud workloads?
The technical case is stronger than you may expect. Google says the single-threaded performance of modern smartphone performance cores can match or beat the per-core performance of some modern multicore servers. In one comparison, a 2023 Pixel Fold was tested against an ASUS RS720A-E11 server using SPEC benchmarks. The Pixel Fold’s performance cores beat the baseline data center server core on many of the tests. That sounds impressive, but there is an important catch.
A smartphone board has a smaller memory limit and fewer cores. It also lacks the management tools and hardware durability that servers are built around. So the project needs the right workloads.
UC San Diego is starting with educational and research computing. That makes sense because many classroom tasks can run on small cloud instances. Google says early experiments showed that a 20-phone cluster could support peak submission rates for a class of more than 75 students. The grading latency also came in below the default AWS backend used in the comparison.
Why UC San Diego is testing a 2,000 Pixel phone data center
UC San Diego plans to use the 2,000-phone cluster to support computer science classes and research workloads. Google says the deployment could support about 100 classes at once. It also describes the system as providing about 50 server-equivalents worth of compute at a fraction of the usual cost.
For a university, that could be a major advantage. Cloud computing costs can rise quickly, especially when many students submit assignments at the same time. If a reused phone cluster can handle some of that load, schools may save money while reducing demand for newly manufactured servers.
This also gives researchers a chance to test phone-based computing at scale. A small lab demo can look promising. A 2,000-board deployment will show much more about reliability, maintenance and day-to-day performance.
Phone cluster computing still has big limits
Phone cluster computing sounds promising, but it still has a lot to prove. Your smartphone was made for daily use in your hand, not nonstop work inside a data center. Data center servers are built to run for years with steady cooling, fast repairs and constant monitoring. Phone motherboards come from devices made for pockets, backpacks and kitchen counters. That alone raises some big questions.
The boards could fail faster than expected. Cooling may also become a challenge once thousands of tiny processors run side by side. Then there is the labor problem, because someone has to safely remove batteries, screens and other parts before the boards can be reused. Cost will be the deciding factor. If teardown, maintenance and replacement work get too expensive, this idea may stay in the research lab.
Phone clusters also will not replace the massive GPU systems that power advanced AI training. They make more sense for smaller cloud jobs, classroom tools and research tasks that fit within smartphone hardware limits. That still leaves plenty of useful work. After all, not every cloud task needs the newest chip.
Why old smartphones could help cut e-waste
The world’s e-waste problem is growing fast. The Global E-waste Monitor projects that electronic waste could climb to 82 million tonnes by 2030, while formal collection and recycling rates are expected to fall to 20%. Old phones are a big part of that problem because many never make it to a proper recycling program. They sit in drawers, land in closets or get tossed out with valuable parts still inside. Even when a phone no longer feels useful to you, its processor, memory and storage may still have work left to do.
CyberGuy has covered related second-life ideas before, including old smartphones being turned into tiny data centers and repurposed EV batteries helping power AI data centers. The common theme is hard to ignore. Some of the hardware already in circulation may still have useful work left to do.
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Google says reusing smartphone motherboards could cut hardware waste and reduce the carbon cost of building new data center servers. (Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)
How to safely recycle or reuse your old phone
This research does not mean you should toss your old phone into a random donation bin tomorrow. Before you recycle, donate, trade in or sell an old phone, you need to protect your data. Back up anything you want to keep. Then sign out of your accounts and securely wipe the device.
CyberGuy has a helpful guide on how to securely get rid of your old cell phone. Privacy comes first whenever you part with a device.
You can also consider trade-in programs, certified refurbishers or reputable electronics recycling programs. If the phone still works, buying refurbished can also keep devices in use longer. CyberGuy has covered what to know before buying refurbished electronics, which is helpful if you want to save money without taking a gamble. The key is to avoid letting old devices sit forgotten forever. A phone in a drawer helps no one.
What this means to you
That old phone in your drawer may not be as useless as it looks. Even if the battery is tired or the camera feels outdated, the processor inside may still have real value.
Now, you probably will not be mailing your old phone to a Google data center anytime soon. Still, this project points to a bigger shift in how we think about retired tech. Instead of sending every old device straight to recycling or letting it collect dust, companies, schools and researchers may find smarter ways to reuse the parts that still work.
There is also a money lesson here. If your current phone still runs well, you may not need to rush into an upgrade just because a newer model comes out. A battery replacement, trade-in or refurbished option could save you money while keeping perfectly good hardware in use longer. To me, that is the real takeaway. The phone you forgot about could possibly still have a job to do.
Watch the CyberGuy Live replay: Lock Down Your Phone in 30 Minutes
Your phone holds your email, passwords, photos, banking apps and personal data. In this free CyberGuy Live replay, Kurt the CyberGuy walks you step by step through simple phone security fixes you can do at your own pace. You’ll learn how to improve your privacy settings, spot the latest phone scams, use trusted security tools and walk away with a simple checklist to stay protected. Watch the replay and get our checklist here: CyberGuyLive.com.
Kurt’s key takeaways
Google and UC San Diego are testing how to turn retired Pixel phone motherboards into a low-carbon cloud computing platform. The project could give old smartphones a second life while reducing the need for newly manufactured servers. That is important as AI data centers keep demanding more computing power and more electricity. The first major test is expected in fall 2026 with a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego. If it works, the cluster could support students and researchers at a lower cost than traditional cloud infrastructure. However, this idea still has to prove it can handle the grind of daily use. Reliability, cooling, teardown labor and maintenance will determine whether phone cluster computing can grow beyond just research. To me, the most relatable part is sitting in your junk drawer. That old phone may seem useless, but its processor could still be powerful enough to help run cloud jobs. Maybe the future of computing starts with hardware we already forgot we owned.
Would you feel good knowing your old phone could help power cloud computing? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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If you’re looking for a relatively affordable way to cut down on cooling costs, Google’s Nest Thermostat can help. It’s packed with smart controls and energy-saving features, and right now it’s on sale in white for $79 ($50 off), which is its best price of the year, at Amazon.
The smart thermostat is quick to install and makes it easy to adjust your home’s temperature whether you’re relaxing in bed or on your way home thanks to the Google Home app. You can also create schedules and control it with your voice using Google Assistant, Alexa, or another Matter-compatible voice assistant.
Once it’s set up, the Nest Thermostat can automatically turn the temperature down when you’re away to help reduce unnecessary energy use, while Google’s Savings Finder feature suggests additional ways to save over time. It also monitors your HVAC system and can alert you if something doesn’t seem right, making it easier to stay on top of maintenance before small issues become bigger, more expensive ones. If you’re eligible, Nest Renew can also automatically shift some of your heating and cooling to times when electricity is cleaner or cheaper.
That said, this is Google’s entry-level model from 2020, so you do miss out on some of the premium features found on the latest Nest Learning Thermostat. Unlike the flagship version, it won’t learn your schedule automatically over time, for example, and lacks support for Nest Temperature Sensors that let you prioritize the temperature in a specific room. Even so, if all you want is an easy way to adjust your home’s temperature remotely and potentially lower your energy bills, the Nest Thermostat is still a solid investment at this price.
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