Acurast links 335,000 phones for AI; Phase preps router

Acurast has brought more than 335,000 smartphones into its network to run AI inference and host agents, the decentralized compute project said. About 40,000 of its devices run on an average day, handling web scraping, cybersecurity, AI inference and agent hosting, according to CoinTelegraph.

Co-founder Alessandro De Carli claims the combined compute of the devices equals roughly 2,340 high-performance data-center servers based on the ASUS RS720A-E11. Acurast says rewards vary with device uptime, hardware performance, the amount of ACU staked and developer demand.

Separately, Phase is preparing a “Phase Router” that would send simple requests to smartphone models in its network and more complex tasks to external providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The project plans to charge 0.5 USDT per 1,000 requests and per 1 GB of traffic, and to buy back PHASE tokens on the market from part of its service revenue for distribution to operators.

Earlier groundwork

In October, Phase launched Phase Proxy, a service that lets smartphone owners relay AI agent traffic and take part in blockchain validation. The projects are pitching idle phones as a cheaper alternative to building dedicated compute capacity: according to background cited in the report, a single 1-gigawatt AI data center can cost 38 billion dollars to build, and criticism over its power and water use is growing.