The Case · CalCompute
The case for a
public option for AI
AI is becoming California's basic infrastructure — and a handful of companies own it. We exist to change that: compute owned by the public and accountable to the Californians whose data, safety and future ride on it.
"Fostering research and innovation that benefits the public… by expanding access to computational resources."
— California Senate Bill 53 · Gov. Code § 11546.8
The Problem
Whoever owns the compute owns the field
Modern AI runs on hardware most institutions will never touch.
Training and running advanced AI takes enormous computing power, and that power sits in private hands. The Senate Judiciary Committee's analysis of SB-53, citing press reporting, laid out the imbalance: one company moved to procure roughly 350,000 specialized GPUs for its AI work. Stanford's Natural Language Processing Group — among the most respected academic AI labs in the world — works with 68.
The consequences follow. In 2022, industry produced 32 significant AI models; academia produced three. Roughly 70 percent of new AI Ph.D.s now go to private industry, up from 21 percent two decades ago. The people who could study these systems in public, for the public, increasingly cannot — the machines they need belong to someone else.
This lands on Californians first. AI already touches your job application, your medical record, your kid's classroom and your government's services. When the infrastructure behind it belongs to a handful of companies, so do the decisions — what gets built, who gets access and whose safety counts. Californians generate the data and live with the consequences, and they hold none of it.
California has faced concentrated private control of essential infrastructure before — water, power, higher education — and answered it each time the same way: build a public option. That is what this law begins.
Figures per the Senate Judiciary Committee analysis of SB-53, citing press reporting.
The Answer
What SB-53 actually built
Read the statute closely. Its precision is its strength.
On Sept. 29, 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 53, enacted as Chapter 138. Its CalCompute provisions are now California Government Code Section 11546.8.
Here is what the law does. Section 11546.8 establishes a consortium within the Government Operations Agency and charges it with developing a framework for the creation of CalCompute, a public cloud computing cluster. The statute directs the consortium to make reasonable efforts, to the extent possible, to establish CalCompute within the University of California. The consortium delivers its framework report to the Legislature by January 1, 2027 and then dissolves.
That structure is the public-option logic, written into law.
Publicly owned
The statute's object is "a public cloud computing cluster" — infrastructure held by the public, with the consortium directed to make reasonable efforts, to the extent possible, to establish it within the University of California.
Publicly governed
Fourteen members, fixed by law: eight appointed by the Secretary of Government Operations, three labor representatives appointed by the Speaker of the Assembly and three public-interest representatives appointed by the Senate Rules Committee.
Accountable
The consortium answers to the Legislature on a statutory deadline — its framework report is due by January 1, 2027 — and then it dissolves. No permanent board and no mission creep.
Sen. Scott Wiener, the bill's author, frames CalCompute as providing free and low-cost access to compute for startups and academic researchers. That is what a public option does: it sets a floor of access the market will not set on its own — for the researchers, the startups and ultimately the Californians the market prices out.
The same discipline runs through the whole law. SB-53 follows the "trust but verify" principle of the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, the expert group Gov. Newsom convened: independent verification instead of taking industry's word for it. CalCompute applies that principle to infrastructure itself — you do not have to trust what you own.
The idea
What's a public option?
A public alternative to private services — priced for access, not profit. California has built one before, each time the market left people behind.
Mail to any address, one price
Low-cost public health coverage
Internet where carriers won't build
Public compute for AI
Public AI — for peopleCalCompute is the newest link in that chain — compute built as part of California's digital public infrastructure.
Proof
What stands today
Not a proposal and not a pilot. Every fact below is verifiable in the statute and the record.
CalCompute went from a vetoed provision to codified law inside a year, and a statutory deadline now sits ahead of it. This coalition is organizing to carry it the rest of the way.
"With a technology as transformative as AI, we have a responsibility to support that innovation while putting in place commonsense guardrails to understand and reduce risk. With this law, California is stepping up, once again, as a global leader on both technology innovation and safety."
— Sen. Scott Wiener, on the signing of SB-53
The case is made. Now build it.
The law is signed, the deadline is set and the coalition is growing — help carry it home. Join the volunteers on 10 UC campuses, or go straight to the primary sources and check every claim on this page.