Billionaires have been on a giving spree recently, particularly toward higher education. Ken Griffin, the Citadel CEO who is making major moves to reshape Miami, just committed an eye-popping $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, the school announced Wednesday.
CMU says this is the largest gift by an individual ever given to a higher education institution, while Nike cofounder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, just committed $1 billion to the University of Oregon and many others have made $100 million–plus gifts to other schools recently. Oil tycoon Harold Hamm recently gave $150 million to the University of Oklahoma.
But Griffin’s gift is noticeably different. It’s establishing an entirely new campus in Miami. Of the $3 billion gift, $1 billion will support CMU’s Pittsburgh campus, while the remaining $2 billion will launch CMU Miami.
Griffin’s big bet on Miami
Griffin, a Florida native who grew up in Boca Raton, moved his family and the headquarters of both Citadel and Citadel Securities to Miami in 2022 after more than three decades in Chicago, where he’d grown increasingly vocal about crime. He insisted taxes weren’t the reason he moved back to Florida, 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 senior editor-at-large Shawn Tully in an interview earlier this year. He also said of the city, “[There’s an] optimism in the air here.”
Education is personally important to Griffin, too. His father was the first in his family to go to 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.
And not only will this be a new location for the 126-year-old institution, but a completely new model. According to the school, CMU Miami will “invert the traditional higher education model” by organizing learning around societal challenges rather than academic majors. This includes topics such as 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 Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, an arts and entertainment district just north of downtown. More recently, Wynwood has drawn a growing number of tech companies and startups. The campus is expected to eventually support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students, and 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 isn’t the only elite school growing its footprint in a new city thanks to 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.
The announcement also suggests that AI’s influence on education and society helped shape the new campus and learning model. CMU president Farnam Jahanian said in a statement the tech “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.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
