History & progress

CalCompute was first unveiled publicly on Sept. 13, 2023, when state Sen. Scott Wiener introduced SB 294, the Safety in Artificial Intelligence Act. Alongside safety testing and disclosure requirements for frontier AI developers, the bill proposed to create CalCompute — described in the announcement as "a cloud-based compute cluster available for use by AI researchers and smaller developers housed in California's world-class public university system."

SB 294 was an intent bill: legislative text put in print to gather feedback rather than to move through committee that year. The announcement placed CalCompute in a specific lineage — it "builds on Stanford's National Research Cloud proposal, leveraging California's world-class public university and community college system to advance the state of the art for an industry that has long called California home."

Read the SB 294 announcement →

The SB 294 framework became SB-1047, Sen. Wiener's 2024 frontier AI safety bill and the first vehicle to carry CalCompute through the full legislative process. Alongside safeguard requirements for developers of powerful AI models, SB-1047 called for the creation of a consortium to develop a framework for a public cloud computing cluster — CalCompute as it would later be codified.

The veto

In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB-1047. His stated rationale was that the bill's regulatory framework targeted AI models based solely on their computational size without accounting for whether models were deployed in high-risk environments. The governor then convened a working group of leading AI experts — Fei-Fei Li, Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Dean Jennifer Tour Chayes — to develop an empirical, science-based framework for AI governance.

Following the veto of SB-1047, Sen. Wiener returned in the 2025 legislative session with SB-53, a narrowed but still consequential AI bill. Where SB-1047 sought to regulate the full lifecycle of frontier AI development, SB-53 focused on transparency, whistleblower protections and catastrophic risk reporting for frontier AI developers — and critically, preserved and formalized CalCompute as a standalone initiative.

The working group convened by Gov. Newsom following his SB-1047 veto — led by Fei-Fei Li, Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Dean Jennifer Tour Chayes — published its final report on June 17, 2025, providing an empirical, science-based framework for California AI governance. SB-53 was designed to be responsive to that report's recommendations.

SB-53 was signed by Gov. Newsom on September 29, 2025 and enacted as Chapter 138 of the California statutes. Under SB-53, California Government Code Section 11546.8 establishes a 14-member Consortium within GovOps to develop the framework for the creation of CalCompute, a public cloud computing cluster. The Consortium must deliver that framework report to the Legislature by January 1, 2027.

"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