Carnegie Mellon University announced Wednesday that hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin is donating $3 billion, with the bulk of the money going toward a new campus in Miami focused on societal challenges. The Pittsburgh-based private research university said the gift is the largest ever single gift to a US university, reports the AP. Other donations topping the billion-dollar mark include $1.8 billion from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, made a $2 billion gift to Oregon Health & Science University in 2025. Griffin's gift includes $2 billion to build a new 35-acre campus in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood, just north of downtown. The campus is expected to enroll around 3,500 undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students. Construction is to begin next year.
Rather than academic majors, it will focus on what the university and Griffin described as "grand challenge areas," such as human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation. The rest of the money will be divided evenly between the Pittsburgh campus' computer science program, which will be renamed after Griffin, and other projects on the main campus. "Throughout our history, CMU has anticipated moments of profound technological change and responded with new ways of thinking and solving problems," President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement. "Artificial intelligence represents one of the defining intellectual developments of our time, and it demands that we rethink how we educate students, conduct research, and partner with others."
Colleges are facing growing pressure to prepare students for a workforce that is rapidly being transformed by AI. At the same time, financial pressures on higher education are mounting. International enrollment is dropping, just as many states are seeing their classes of high school seniors begin to shrink because of US demographic changes. Griffin, a GOP megadonor who founded the Citadel investment firm, owns a waterfront home in Miami, which is part of a growing metro area whose population tops 6.4 million. The area already is home to the University of Miami, a private research university; Florida International University, a public research university; and Miami Dade College, which started as a community college but also offers four-year degrees. Combined, enrollment at the three schools totals around 135,000. Several smaller private colleges are also based in the area.
But Griffin, who has donated over the years to causes such as medical research, charter schools, and other universities, saw room for something new. "The opportunity to bring Carnegie Mellon to Miami places our city at the heart of humanistic and scientific advancement and amplifies the University's international reach and impact," said Griffin, who is joining Carnegie Mellon's Board of Trustees, in a news release. Even before the announcement, Carnegie Mellon had growing ties to Florida, a state where conservatives have increased their influence on higher education. Its computer science department runs a program designed to teach middle school students in Florida and several other states about AI. The university also is involved in a partnership with the Gates Foundation to deploy AI-powered course materials for introductory math classes at Miami Dade College.
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