While just a few years ago, old phones ended up forgotten in drawers as worthless electronic waste, spring 2026 brings a radical change. If you own an older flagship, you may be holding a commodity whose price on the secondary market is growing faster than the shares of technology giants.
The reason is not nostalgia, but the harsh pragmatism of the semiconductor industry: a hunger for memory chips. Behind the current skyrocketing prices of recycled hardware is a change in global semiconductor production. With the massive rise of generative artificial intelligence and the construction of giant data centers, key players such as Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron have shifted their production capacities to high-end AI accelerators.
Standard NAND flash storage and LPDDR memory modules, which form the heart of ordinary smartphones, have thus found themselves on the sidelines. The result is critical shortage of components on the market, which is forcing electronics manufacturers to take an unexpected step – “mining” chips from older devices.
This process, where they professionally desolder functional memory modules from motherboards for further use, has driven the buyback prices of old phones up to five or six times their original estimated value. So if you have an old mobile phone at home, it could be a hidden treasure.
Which models are in the sights of "miners"?
Recycling centers and specialized companies do not focus on cheap models. Their primary goal is high-density recording device and modern memory architecture. Within the ecosystem of Chinese manufacturers, especially brands Xiaomi a POCO, the demand is the most aggressive.
The most valuable old mobile phones containing important components currently include the following series:
- Xiaomi 13
- Xiaomi 14
- Xiaomi 15
- POCO F7 (especially the high storage capacity version)
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In China, the epicenter of this new business, the purchase price for functional hardware with usable memory has stabilized at around $60 to $70This is a dramatic jump from earlier symbolic amounts in the order of a few dollars.
According to statistics from the China Circular Economy Association, the market will produce over 400 million phones discarded annually, but only a fraction undergoes official recycling. While the current boom is good for the environment and the reuse of precious metals and silicon, it also brings significant risks for the original owners.
Since memory chips are the main item that buyers are interested in, secure data deletion has never been more important. Simply deleting photos is not enough – within the system HyperOS It is necessary to perform a deep cleaning. How to do it?
Before selling or recycling your device in HyperOS, go to: Settings > About the phone > Factory reset and select Clear all dataThis process will erase the encryption keys, making the data on the chip unreadable digital noise for a future processor.
