Acurast Pitches Its Smartphone Computing Network as a Way to Support Philippine AI Workloads

Acurast, a decentralised computing project that turns ordinary smartphones into processing nodes, is promoting its network as a possible complement to the Philippines’ national AI infrastructure plans, Newsbytes.PH reported on October 28. The company says everyday phones could take on some computing tasks as demand for AI services grows faster than new data centre capacity can be built.

Acurast says its network has grown to about 340,000 smartphones in more than 175 countries since its mainnet launched in January 2026, and it aims to pass two million devices. Phone owners join by installing the Processor Lite app or the Acurast Core app, and their devices then run workloads such as blockchain data feeds, AI inference, web scraping and zero-knowledge proofs. The company says it uses cryptographic device verification, trusted execution environments and attestation so that computations can be checked without exposing the underlying data.

The pitch is tied directly to Philippine policy. The Philippine AI Infrastructure Masterplan for 2026 to 2033 aims to expand the country’s AI compute capacity from about 50 megawatts to as much as 1.5 gigawatts. Acurast argues that a distributed network built on devices people already own could add capacity for lighter tasks and widen participation beyond the companies that can afford large facilities.

What it means in practice

The idea has some appeal in a country with high smartphone use and an uneven grid. But phones are no substitute for the large GPU clusters needed to train and serve big models, and the masterplan still depends on power, land and skilled workers. The Department of Information and Communications Technology’s AI-Plus infrastructure masterplan and the energy plan backing the 1.5 GW compute push with gas and renewables are built around physical data centres for that reason.

For phone owners, the practical questions are battery wear, mobile data use, heat and how much they would actually earn, which the report did not quantify. For businesses, the issue is reliability: a job spread across thousands of consumer devices has to cope with phones switching off, losing signal or being replaced. Security claims based on trusted execution environments also depend on the hardware, and older or cheaper phones may not offer the same protections.

Acurast is a blockchain-linked project with commercial interests in the model it is promoting, and it has not announced a partnership with any Philippine agency. What to watch next is whether it publishes Philippine node numbers, signs local partners such as universities or telcos, and shows paying AI workloads running on the network rather than mainly crypto-related tasks.