About us
A community building public AI for California.
We organize Californians — students, researchers, advocates and neighbors across the state — to win a publicly owned AI cloud. Born at the University of California, open to everyone with a stake in public AI. Every face behind this text chose to be here — no mandate, no paycheck, no agency in charge.
This isn't
a government program handed down to us, or a company chasing a market.
This is
students and faculty doing it ourselves — because we're the ones who need it.
Why we're doing this
The people priced out of AI shouldn't have to wait for it.
The compute gap is stark: per the Senate Judiciary Committee's analysis of SB-53, one company alone aims to procure 350,000 GPUs while Stanford's entire NLP Group works with 68 — a divide that excludes virtually every student, researcher, startup and public-interest group in California.
CalCompute is California's public option for that infrastructure. SB-53 wrote it into law — and we organized to carry it forward.
Read the case →"Fostering research and innovation that benefits the public… enabling equitable innovation by expanding access to computational resources."
— California Senate Bill 53
Our story
It started with a handful of students who wouldn't let it drop.
No one appointed us. Here's how a few people at one campus became a coalition across the whole UC system.
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The spark
A few UC students, one question
SB-53 wrote CalCompute into law. A small group asked: if we don't organize to carry it forward, who will?
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Campus by campus
Word spread across the UCs
UC Berkeley reached UC Riverside reached UC Santa Cruz reached UCLA. Students recruited students; each brought their own campus in.
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Faculty step up
Researchers volunteered their time
Professors and research staff joined on their own hours — lending expertise, not taking direction.
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Now
An independent, volunteer coalition
Volunteers on 10 campuses doing the research, writing and advocacy to make public compute real — for ourselves.
Where CalCompute could live
The law points CalCompute here.
SB-53 directs the consortium to make "reasonable efforts" to establish CalCompute within the University of California — a system of 10 campuses, from UC Davis to UC San Diego.
UC Davis UC Berkeley UC San Francisco UC Santa Cruz UC Merced UC Santa Barbara UCLA UC Riverside UC Irvine UC San Diego This only works if more of us show up.
If you're a Californian who wants public AI to exist — student, researcher, advocate or neighbor, UC or not — there's a place for you in this coalition.