Ken Griffin Donates $3 Billion to Carnegie Mellon, Largest Gift to a U.S. University

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin is donating $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest single gift ever made to a U.S. university. The Pittsburgh-based private research university announced the donation Wednesday.

The bulk of the money — $2 billion — will 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, with construction scheduled to begin next year.

The remaining $1 billion will be split evenly between the Pittsburgh campus's computer science program, which will be renamed after Griffin, and other unspecified projects on the main campus.

Rather than traditional academic majors, the Miami campus will focus on what the university and Griffin described in a news release as "grand challenge areas": human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.

"Throughout our history, CMU has anticipated moments of profound technological change and responded with new ways of thinking and solving problems," Carnegie Mellon President Farnam Jahanian said in the release. "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."

The gift resets the benchmark for higher education philanthropy. Previous billion-dollar donations 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, gave $2 billion to Oregon Health & Science University in 2025.

Griffin, who founded the Citadel investment firm and is a GOP megadonor, owns a waterfront home in Miami. He framed the donation as a play for the city's global standing.

"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," Griffin said in the release. He is also joining Carnegie Mellon's Board of Trustees.

Miami's metropolitan area, with a population topping 6.4 million, already hosts the University of Miami, Florida International University and Miami Dade College, which together enroll roughly 135,000 students. Several smaller private colleges also operate in the area. Griffin, who has previously donated to medical research, charter schools and other universities, saw room for something new.

The donation lands at a moment of converging pressures on higher education. Colleges face growing demand to prepare students for a workforce being transformed by AI, as job postings requiring AI and machine learning skills multiply. At the same time, international enrollment is falling, many states are seeing their high school senior classes shrink due to U.S. demographic changes, and expenses like fuel, healthcare and technology keep rising.

Carnegie Mellon had already built ties to Florida, a state where conservatives have increased their influence on higher education. Its computer science department runs a program teaching middle school students in Florida and several other states about AI, and the university partners with the Gates Foundation to deploy AI-powered course materials for introductory math classes at Miami Dade College.

With construction starting next year, the Wynwood campus will test whether a top-ranked research university can anchor a new talent pipeline in a city better known for finance and tourism than computer science.