Root 
Compute that belongs to us.
Building the infrastructure for an open source future.
Root Compute is a members’ co-op. It pools the gaming GPUs ordinary people already own into one shared compute cloud, owned and run by the people who power it. Not for profit.
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Here, the members are the owners.
Everyone has a say in how their compute is used, how it’s powered, how their data is handled, and what it costs.
- Owned, not rented.Members own the co-op, so the machines you rely on can’t be sold out from under you.
- Your data stays with you.Your prompts and files aren’t logged, kept or sold.
- Keeping them honest.Even if you never join, a member-owned option means the big companies can’t set every term.
AI that works for you, not on you
Right now AI is mostly used by large companies that gather data about you and use it to steer what you buy, what you want, and how long you stay on their apps.
There’s another future. In it, ordinary people hold that power themselves, and they use AI and their own data to learn, understand the world and their own lives, and build something better for themselves.
If people don’t own a real share of this technology, the companies that do will hold more power over our lives than anyone ever has. They already have too much. AI multiplies it.
Today, if you want to use serious AI, you rent it from one of a few giant companies or buy hardware most people can’t afford. A co-op gives you a third choice: share the machines and own them together.
Meanwhile millions of gaming cards sit idle most of the day in bedrooms and dens. The idea is simple: borrow it from your neighbor while they’re not using theirs, and lend yours back when you’re not.
Open models only, which anyone can download and run, so nothing gets switched off because a company changed its mind.
For businesses and builders, here is what the big rental clouds charge for one card, by the hour:
| Card | Where | Per hour |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA H100 SXM 80 GB | Lambda | $3.99 |
| NVIDIA H100 SXM 80 GB | RunPod (secure cloud) | $3.99 |
| NVIDIA A100 SXM 80 GB | Lambda | $2.79 |
| NVIDIA RTX 4090 24 GB | RunPod (secure cloud) | $0.89 |
Prices as of Oct 18, 2026, from lambda.ai/pricing and runpod.io/pricing. Lambda’s H100 rate is per card in an 8-card machine; RunPod rents a single card. One H100 for a month (730 hours) at $3.99 is $2,912.70.
AI shouldn’t be something we rent from a few companies. It should be ours.
When nobody would serve them, ordinary people built their own.
Rural electric co-ops
In the 1930s, power companies wouldn’t run lines out to farms. So farmers built their own electric co-ops, and they still power a huge share of rural America.
Credit unions
Owned by their members. They exist to serve the people who bank there, not to squeeze them for shareholders.
Green Bay Packers
Owned by the fans. Nobody can sell the team or move it out of town.
Those co-ops did it by the will of their communities, and they did it locally: one county’s power lines, one town’s bank, one city’s football team. Root Compute is the same idea on a scale never tried before. Members all over the world, combining what they already own into one shared machine.
The free projects that hold everything up
Much of the modern world runs on things nobody owns. Free maps, a free encyclopedia, free operating systems and a free library of the web. They were built by volunteers and kept alive by donations, and they quietly hold up much of daily life.
But computing power is not free.
How far those projects can go is limited by the servers and graphics cards they can afford. Pool our idle cards and that limit moves. Root Compute wants to give back to the open source community and become part of it, so free projects can continue to hold their own among the big corporations.
AI is the first crop, not the whole garden.
Grow a network owned and operated by our communities
Under a forest, roots are linked by a web of fungus that carries water and nutrients between trees. No single tree runs it, and the whole forest is stronger for it.
Root Compute works the same way. Each home is a node, and we’re the pathways between them. Together, ordinary homes work as one machine, owned by the people who run it. That shared power is open to anyone building for the common good: developers making open tools, and neighbors gathering and studying what matters where they live, like the air on their street, the pollen in their yards, or which roads flood first. Answers about your own neighborhood, found by your own neighbors.
If you don’t own it, you don’t decide.
Why own compute at all?
Whoever owns the computers sets the rules, the prices, and who gets cut off. Right now that’s a handful of companies. It doesn’t have to be.
Compute that people hold in common is useful for far more than chatbots, and every page below takes one reason.
The window is closingAI is accelerating.Ordinary people still own the hardware, and the best open models are still free. Every year a little more of that slips away.
Today, ordinary people still own serious computing power: the graphics cards in our gaming PCs. Every year, a bit more of that slips into a few companies’ hands, and once we depend on something, the terms change. A member-owned option keeps everyone honest: it doesn’t have to beat Amazon on price, it just has to exist. The window closes when ordinary people stop owning the machines.
Read more →Five tech giants hold about 70% of the world’s AI computing power.If you don’t own it, you don’t decideWhoever owns the machines sets the rules, the prices and who gets cut off.
People are right to be fed up with big tech, but the problem isn’t the technology. It’s who owns it. Root Compute holds its computing in common instead: it’s a co-op, the members own it, and the calls a company would make behind closed doors, members make in the open.
Prompts are never logged or kept, and a host sees a stranger’s words with nothing attached.
Read more →Not just chatbotsThe bigger gardenScience, art and open source all need computing power, and right now they rent it from the same few companies.
Open source quietly holds up a lot of the world, but while the code is free, the machines it runs on are not. Pool the millions of graphics cards that sit idle most of the day, and the open source world gains a shared machine bigger than any one project could ever afford. Root Compute aims to build one global network anyone can call on, for any job.
Read more →0 new data centersNot in your backyardThe machines already exist, in our homes. No sacrifice zones.
Root Compute runs on machines that already exist, spread across many homes. It puts the idle hours of gaming PCs to work instead of pouring concrete for another giant building, and when the work is spread across thousands of homes, no single town carries all of it. Every member who lends a card decides where its power comes from.
We are not claiming Root Compute uses less energy overall.
Read more →One member, one votePower instead of profitMembers decide what it runs and why. Profit need not be the only motive.
Most AI is built to make money for whoever owns it. It doesn’t have to be that way. AI can exist to benefit ordinary people, boosting and amplifying the skills and ideas of anyone who uses it.
Read more →
Who’s behind this
I’m Nick Bissanti, a pool guy in Cape Coral, Florida.
I’ve always been interested in technology. I was enamored with it as a kid and a young adult, but somewhere in the last ten or fifteen years I went from loving it to hating it. I don’t think that’s because of the technology. I think it’s because of the people making it, and why they’re making it. Too much of it now seems built to benefit the people selling it and to manipulate the rest of us into buying and using more, and I hate what it’s turning our society into, what it’s turning my neighbors, my family and my friends into, and most importantly, what it was turning me into.
Then something changed. I was paying hundreds of dollars a month for an app to run my pool business, so I used AI to build my own, and along the way I started to see the potential for a brighter future. If I could make something like this, anybody with the time and persistence could do the same for their own business and their own life. The possibilities are limited only by your ideas.
So I kept going, building a voice assistant, a phone system for my business, a music recommendation app, a phone launcher and countless personal apps to improve my quality of life, until I realized I was using AI to replace everything I was spending money on, and in doing that I was spending a lot of money on AI.
AI is getting into everything, and soon everyone will rely on it. I already do. I don’t want to see a future where something we all depend on is owned by the same kind of people, or becomes out of reach because the subscription goes up, or the cost of living does, and people just can’t afford it anymore. This is going to be such an important part of our lives that there should never be a barrier between people and a tool this powerful and this helpful.
Get on the waitlist
The beta will be small and invite-only. Add your name whether you’ve got a GPU to lend or you just want computing that’s on your side.
Join the waitlist