Ken Griffin is donating $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, most of it to establish a new campus in Miami, in the largest single gift committed to a US university.
The founder of financial firm Citadel is giving $2 billion to help build the Miami location and another $1 billion for the university’s main campus in Pittsburgh, according to a joint statement released Wednesday.
“If you look across the United States, our great cities are anchored by world-class universities,” Griffin said in an interview. “We want to create that same ecosystem of economic vitality and prosperity around this campus in Miami.”
The commitment will more than double Griffin’s previous donations, bringing the total to roughly $5.7 billion. Over the past three decades, he has emerged as one of the nation’s biggest individual philanthropists, giving heavily to education, science and medicine, as well as civic causes.
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“This will be one of the highest impact gifts I will make in my life,” Griffin said Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television from Pittsburgh.
The 57-year-old Florida native said he envisions the 35-acre Miami campus connecting students with the city’s technology companies while fostering innovation and economic growth.
His donation comes as families increasingly question the cost and value of a college education, while artificial intelligence reshapes the entry-level job market and tuition has risen sharply in recent years.
Griffin said he is seeking to develop a model structured around problem solving in industries that are crucial to US competitiveness and national security. The expansion, he said, is more akin to creating a new university designed to address the challenges of this century.
“As a nation, we need to be very focused strategically on how we maximize the impact of our higher education spending on the future prospects of America,” he said.
Carnegie Mellon University Miami will focus on four “great challenge” areas: human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.
“Higher ed is at an inflection point,” said Farnam Jahanian, Carnegie Mellon’s president and a professor of electrical and computer engineering. “Universities have the responsibility to prepare students for a world that’s changing.”
For Griffin, it expands on his push to shape South Florida’s business, civic and cultural landscape. Griffin, who began trading from his Harvard University dorm room, has built a fortune now estimated at $57.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In 2022, he moved Citadel’s headquarters to Miami from Chicago, joining an influx of wealthy residents and companies that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Citadel is now constructing a high-rise in Brickell, the city’s financial district.
The new Carnegie Mellon campus will be built in Wynwood, an arts district that in recent years has also sought to attract technology companies. Planning for the facilities began about two years ago, and the campus could open as soon as 2028. It is expected to eventually serve more than 3,500 undergraduate, graduate and PhD students.
Other prominent business figures have also used their wealth to remake South Florida’s educational and corporate infrastructure. Stephen Ross, the developer and owner of the Miami Dolphins, has helped attract Vanderbilt University to West Palm Beach, where the university is building a campus on public land.
Griffin grew up in nearby Boca Raton before going on to attend Harvard. He has given more than $500 million to his alma mater, which renamed its graduate school of arts and sciences in his honor.
In April 2023, he made a gift of $300 million to the Ivy League school. The following year he announced a pause, saying the university was “lost in the wilderness of microaggressions and a DEI agenda that seems to have no real end game.” He has subsequently made smaller donations to the university.
Griffin said conditions at American universities have improved in the last two years and displayed a more conciliatory tone toward their leadership.
“We need to learn from our success stories and play to our success stories, rather than whine about the universities that aren’t delivering value for their students,” he told Bloomberg Television.
Griffin has also donated extensively to institutions in Chicago, including the Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Chicago’s economics department, both of which bear his name. In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon plans to rename its School of Computer Science for Griffin.
At $3 billion, his gift would surpass other large single gifts to universities.
Last year, Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, announced a $2 billion donation to the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute. They announced a separate $1 billion gift to the University of Oregon earlier this month, adding to other giving there.
Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, announced a $1.8 billion gift to his alma mater Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Giving to Hopkins by Bloomberg Philanthropies has exceeded $4.5 billion.
Carnegie Mellon traces its origins to another businessman, Andrew Carnegie. The steel magnate donated $1 million in 1900 to the city of Pittsburgh, where his business was based. He envisioned a school where working-class men and women could learn practical skills to improve their lives.
More recently, Carnegie Mellon’s research activities “helped transform Pittsburgh’s economic landscape,” Jahanian said. Hundreds of startups have come out of the university. A former steel-manufacturing hub that saw its industrial economy wither, Pittsburgh now has more than 250 advanced technology firms, including 100 in robotics and another 100 across various AI fields, he said.
“Working with the private sector, and accelerating taking ideas and concepts to discovery, to impact, is so much part of the DNA of Carnegie Mellon,” said Jahanian.
The university, which has more than 14,000 students in Pittsburgh, is known for programs in fields including computer science and engineering. More than two decades ago, it expanded its reach elsewhere. It opened a campus in Qatar in 2004, with funding from the Qatar Foundation. It also has outposts in Rwanda and Silicon Valley.
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