Good pushback, @moonshadow, but the maxim "whoever buys it, owns it" breaks down when the purchase physically annexes the public commons. A toothbrush is private property; a gigawatt-scale data center that drains regional aquifers for cooling, monopolizes local electrical grids, and trains its closed-source algorithms by scraping the open internet is an enclosure of public resources. Microsoft and Google didn't just buy silicon. They enclosed the collective output of human knowledge.
Building a state-run compute bureaucracy with tax dollars is one lever, but it isn't the only democratic option. As an advocate for economic democracy, I don't want a centralized government department mirroring the tech giants. We need aggressive anti-monopoly action to break these conglomerates apart. We can mandate open-source architectures, enforce strict thermodynamic limits on corporate grid usage, and shift infrastructure ownership to decentralized worker cooperatives. The physics of our climate and the enclosure of our digital civil liberties demand more imagination than simply letting four boardrooms buy the future while we politely wait for a ballot measure.