The window is open. It won’t stay open.

If you’ve shopped for a graphics card or memory (RAM) lately, you’ve felt it. Nvidia, whose chips power most gaming cards, now brings in about twelve times as much revenue from AI data centers as from gamers: $193.7 billion against $16 billion last year.[1] At the start of 2026, the price PC makers pay for memory was forecast to more than double in a single quarter.[2]

Gamers, artists and everyday buyers aren’t the main customer anymore. The chipmakers sell to the giants first, and everyone else gets what’s left.

As we grow, we buy together, starting with retired data-center hardware for the co-op’s shared hubs.

Five companies, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, held about 70% of the world’s AI computing power by the end of 2025, up from 63% in early 2024.[3] Four of the biggest, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, plan around $735 billion of spending this year, most of it on AI data centers.[4] Nobody out-builds that.

Spent Planned (line shows the range)

Sources: each company’s annual and quarterly reports filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2020–2025: cash spent on property and equipment, by calendar year (Microsoft’s year runs July to June, so its quarters are regrouped). 2026: each company’s own stated plan, listed under the next chart. The plans count slightly more than the earlier years, because Microsoft’s and Meta’s include some leased equipment.

They keep growing, faster every year, and if we don’t get some of it now, the rest of us will be left in the dust.

Sources: Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy on its earnings call, July 30, 2026. Google’s parent Alphabet, finance chief Anat Ashkenazi on its earnings call, July 22, 2026. Microsoft, finance chief Amy Hood on its earnings call, July 29, 2026 (for calendar 2026). Meta, its third-quarter 2026 results, October 21, 2026.

Source: Epoch AI, “Trends in AI” (updated February 5, 2026): the computing power used to build the leading AI models has grown about 5 times a year since 2020. The line shows that yearly rate, not each model one by one. Epoch’s earlier estimate (May 2024) was 4 to 5 times a year.

Google Photos stored compressed copies of your photos free and without limit until June 2021, when new uploads started counting against your storage.[5] In 2023 Twitter cut off the free access that other apps were built on,[6] Reddit’s new fees shut down Apollo, one of its most popular outside apps,[7] and Netflix started charging extra to share your password.[8] Unity tried to charge game makers a fee per install once a game passed certain thresholds, and only backed down after a revolt.[9]

Search shows where it ends up: about nine in ten searches now go through one company.[10]

AI is already on that road. OpenAI started as a nonprofit. In 2025 it finished moving its main business into a for-profit company,[11] and in January 2026 it announced it would start testing ads in ChatGPT in the US.[12]

Once something is built into how we work, learn and play, its owners can change the price and the rules whenever they like.

It can feel like nothing is owned anymore, and everything is rented. You used to buy a program, a game or a movie once, and it was yours. Now more and more of it is rented by the month, and what you rent can be taken back.

• Software. In 2013 Adobe announced that Photoshop and its other design apps would be subscription-only from then on. The last version you could buy outright stayed on sale for a while, but it never got new features.[13]
• Your own car. In 2022 BMW began charging drivers in some countries, including the UK and South Korea, about $18 a month to switch on heated seats already built into the car.[14]
• Shows you paid for. In December 2023 PlayStation told people that Discovery shows they had bought would disappear from their libraries. Sony only backed down after a last-minute licensing deal.[15]
• Games you paid for. Ubisoft shut down the servers for The Crew in 2024, and a game people had bought stopped working.[16] Around the same time, Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions said gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games, the way people “got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection.”[17]
• Gadgets. Spotify sold a $90 gadget for cars, then switched every one of them off and told owners to throw them away.[18]
• Even books. In 2009 Amazon reached into people’s Kindles and deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 they had paid for, refunding them afterward.[19]

It got bad enough that in 2024 California passed a law that makes digital stores say plainly when “buying” only gets you a license that can be taken away.[20] And the rent adds up: in a 2022 survey, Americans guessed they spent $86 a month on subscriptions. When they listed them, it came to $219.[21]

AI is being sold the same way, by the month, by a few companies. In a network the members own, the members make the rules: prices and rules are set in the open, one member, one vote once the founders’ temporary extra say ends, and the charter means nobody can sell it out from under you.

Plenty of people are wary of AI, and that’s fair. But look at what the worry is about. Most Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, say they have little or no confidence that companies will develop and use AI responsibly,[22] and more than half want more control over how AI is used in their lives.[23] That’s less about the technology than about who controls it.

The problems with AI as it stands

• Nobody trusts the companies running it. Members own Root Compute and vote on what it runs.
• It burns huge amounts of power and disrupts communities. Root Compute builds no data centers. It runs on cards people already own, spread across thousands of homes, so no single town takes on a giant new load and nobody’s water goes to cooling. And we plan to incentivize members who power their cards with solar.
• It’s built on scraped work and people’s data. Root Compute won’t scrape anything, and the content of your requests is never kept.
• It’s used to watch people. No surveillance work. It’s on the list of what Root Compute refuses.
• Five companies control most of it. About seventy percent of AI computing power sits with five companies. Root Compute builds a people-powered alternative, owned by its members.

A tool owned by the people who use it answers to them. (More on ownership.)

The co-op doesn’t have to beat Amazon on price. It just has to exist.

Linux, the free operating system, never killed Windows. But in 1998 Microsoft’s own leaked memos called open-source software (free software anyone can copy and change) a direct threat,[24] and the company went from calling Linux “a cancer” in 2001 to announcing “Microsoft loves Linux” in 2014.[25]

We think a member-owned option, free to use whenever there’s spare capacity, can do the same thing: set a floor the big companies have to stay good enough to beat. That levels the playing field a little for everyone, members or not.

AI is just the first job. Once thousands of ordinary computers are linked into one network, that network can take on other big jobs that split into pieces, like rendering animation or crunching numbers for science, under the same safety rules: only approved, published jobs, walled off from the rest of the lender’s computer.

Home cards are held back by slow links between them. Researchers are already working on it, and when they crack it, the machines will already be ours.

What it takes on is for the members to decide, one member, one vote once the founders’ temporary extra say ends (How it works says when). (The bigger garden.)

Not investors. Not an ad business. Us.