Unused phone as AI server

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • The article suggests repurposing an unused phone as a small on-device AI inference “server.”
  • It describes modifying Google’s AI Edge Gallery into an OpenAI-compatible API server so users can call it using standard chat/completions-style requests.
  • It links to a GitHub project (“gallery as server”) that provides the approach for exposing the phone’s local inference via an API.
  • It notes that multiple old phones could be combined into a lightweight inference cluster for greater throughput.
Unused phone as AI server

If you have an unused phone lying around, you might be sitting on a tiny AI server

I’ve been working on a project where I modified Google AI Edge Gallery and turned it into an OpenAI-compatible API server: [Gallery as Server](https://github.com/xiaoyao9184/gallery)

Your phone can run local AI inference

You can call it just like an OpenAI API (chat/completions, etc.)

Instead of letting that hardware collect dust, you can turn it into a lightweight inference node.

So yeah—if you have more than one old phone, you can literally build yourself a cluster.

submitted by /u/Ok_Fig5484
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