PALO ALTO, CA - APRIL 21: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (C) looks at a computer screen with Facebook employees while touring the Facebook headquarters April 21, 2009 in Palo Alto, California. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced today in a Twitter message that he is officially running for governor of California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
San Francisco, California – Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new international agreement Wednesday that puts California and Denmark side by side in an effort to speed up the global transition to clean energy while also setting the rules for how emerging technologies are deployed.
At a ceremony in San Francisco, Newsom joined Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Denmark’s ambassador to the United States, Jesper Møller Sørensen, to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The deal outlines cooperation on building climate resilience, expanding clean energy, and developing policy around digital innovation, including artificial intelligence.
“California is a stable, reliable partner,” Newsom said, positioning the state once again as an actor on the world stage. Rasmussen echoed that point. “We are both frontrunners within green energy, innovation, and sustainability. If we combine our efforts, we can really push forward,” he said.
The agreement sets out a few clear goals. It commits both parties to reaching carbon neutrality by 2045. It strengthens digital and cyber resilience through shared research and policy. It creates a framework for public-private collaboration on technology, with a focus on sustainability and AI. And it calls for a regular exchange of best practices through trade missions, delegations, and joint projects.
For Newsom, the partnership with Denmark is the latest in a growing series of international climate agreements. His administration has now signed deals with governments in 27 countries, representing more than a quarter of the world’s population and trillions of dollars in economic activity. Over the past two years, California has inked agreements with Mexico, Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, and multiple Chinese provinces, among others.
Those partnerships, Newsom argues, show that California can act where the federal government often can’t. “Pollution is down and the economy is up,” his office noted. Since 2000, greenhouse gas emissions in California have dropped 20 percent while the state’s GDP has grown nearly 80 percent. In 2023, two-thirds of California’s electricity came from clean sources—making it the largest economy in the world to reach that benchmark.
Technology is increasingly part of that story. California is home to 32 of the 50 leading AI companies in the world. Newsom has moved to channel that dominance into state policy, signing an executive order in 2023 that set guidelines for how the state procures and uses generative AI. His administration has also championed laws requiring AI watermarking, banning AI-generated child pornography, and creating guardrails against deepfake election content.
The new partnership with Denmark links those two pieces of California’s identity: its climate ambitions and its technology sector. By bringing Silicon Valley know-how into the same conversation as renewable energy policy, the state hopes to model what a responsible digital and green transition can look like.
For Denmark, whose offshore wind and green energy leadership is globally recognized, the tie-up provides access to the scale and capital of California. For California, it offers a chance to double down on its international role. As Newsom put it, “We are stepping up to the world stage.”
