Ken Griffin Commits Record $3 Billion to Carnegie Mellon for Miami Campus

Ken Griffin has committed $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest gift by an individual ever given to a higher education institution, the school announced Wednesday. Of that total, $2 billion will launch a completely new campus in Miami — the city the Citadel CEO now calls home — while $1 billion will support CMU's existing Pittsburgh campus.

The gift dwarfs the recent wave of billionaire donations to universities. Nike cofounder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, committed $1 billion to the University of Oregon in September, and oil tycoon Harold Hamm gave $150 million to the University of Oklahoma days later. Griffin's stands apart in scale and in structure: it plants a 126-year-old institution in a new city with a redesigned academic model.

A bet on Miami

Griffin, a Florida native who grew up in Boca Raton, moved both his family and the headquarters of Citadel and Citadel Securities from Chicago to Miami in 2022, ending more than three decades in Illinois, where he had grown increasingly vocal about crime. He insisted taxes were not the reason for the move, citing "great schools, a great environment" and streets that are "safe and clean."

Citadel now employs about 500 people in Miami and is building a 54-story headquarters on Brickell Bay, slated for completion in 2030 at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion.

"The best thing I ever did was move to Miami for my kids," Griffin told Fortune's Senior Editor-at-Large Shawn Tully in an interview earlier this year. He also described an "optimism in the air here."

Education has personal weight for Griffin. His father was the first in his family to attend college, and his grandmother paid for all of her grandchildren's college educations.

"The belief in the family was always that education was the road to prosperity," Griffin said in a statement released by CMU. "It's the on-ramp to the American dream." He has now given more than $5.7 billion to education, opportunity, and health sciences causes, according to the university, including more than $500 million to his alma mater, Harvard University.

A new model, not just a new location

CMU says the Miami campus will "invert the traditional higher education model" by organizing learning around societal challenges rather than academic majors. The focus areas include human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation. The school will also prioritize new approaches to teaching and learning.

The campus is planned for Wynwood, an arts and entertainment district just north of downtown Miami that has recently drawn a growing number of tech companies and startups. It is expected to eventually support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. students, along with nearly 300 faculty. Griffin will join CMU's board of trustees.

"Great American cities are anchored by great universities, with almost no exception," Griffin told the Financial Times.

CMU is not the only elite school expanding into a new city on billionaire backing. In July, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori, pledged $75 million to Vanderbilt University to create a new art, architecture, and design college at its San Francisco campus.

AI's influence on education also shaped the new campus. CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement that the technology "demands that we rethink how we educate students, conduct research, and partner with others."

Construction is slated to begin in 2027, and CMU plans to enroll its first Miami students in 2028, pending regulatory approvals.

"What we're about to embark on in Miami will create one of the great stories in higher education of our lifetime," Griffin said in a statement.

With the gift, Griffin ties his philanthropy directly to the city where he has relocated his business empire — and positions Miami to compete for the talent that has historically clustered around Carnegie Mellon's Pittsburgh base.