Natalie Foster

Natalie Foster is a co-founder and board member of the Economic Security Project, a national organization that advocates for economic power, public investment, and anti-monopoly policy. She is widely recognized as one of the most influential voices making the public case for CalCompute — and for public compute infrastructure more broadly — in the United States.

Foster is the author of the phrase that has become the defining frame for CalCompute’s mission: “Compute is the highway system of the AI revolution, the essential infrastructure required to develop and run advanced AI systems.” This framing — that compute is infrastructure, not a commodity, and that infrastructure serving the public interest must have a public option — has been adopted by advocates, governments, and journalists covering the CalCompute initiative.

In January and February 2025, Foster published back-to-back commentaries in CalMatters and the San Diego Union-Tribune making the affirmative case for CalCompute following the veto of SB-1047. She placed CalCompute in a global context — alongside New York’s $400 million Empire AI initiative, the UK’s AI Research Resource, and the EU’s EuroHPC AI Factories — and argued that California’s proposal offered “a vital model for how public computing infrastructure could work — and a template for federal action.”

Foster’s commentary named the structural problem driving the need for CalCompute with precision: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s dominance of two-thirds of the global cloud market has created a barrier to entry that prices out universities, startups, UCs, and public interest organizations from meaningful participation in AI development. A single leading AI model can cost $80–100 million to train — a price tag that excludes virtually everyone outside Big Tech. CalCompute, in Foster’s framing, is the public-option answer to this structural imbalance: complementary to private providers, free from profit motives, and designed to ensure that the next wave of AI innovation serves all Californians.

The Economic Security Project is a founding coalition partner of CaliforniaCompute.org. Foster co-founded the organization in 2016 alongside Chris Hughes, with a mission to advance economic security for all Americans through direct cash, anti-monopoly advocacy, and public investment.