Ken Griffin donates $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon, largest US higher-ed gift

Miami campus targets AI, defense tech, advanced manufacturing

Citadel chief executive Ken Griffin is donating $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University—$2 billion to launch a new Miami campus focused on technology and innovation and $1 billion to the Pittsburgh campus—making the combined gift the largest single individual donation to U.S. higher education, according to an announcement from the university.

The 35-acre Miami campus will rise in the Wynwood neighborhood and will be Carnegie Mellon’s largest expansion by far, exceeding the several hundred students served at the university’s satellite locations in New York City, Mountain View, California, and Qatar. Carnegie Mellon projects the Miami site eventually will support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. students, nearly 300 faculty and more than 600 staff. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027, with first enrollment planned for 2028.

“The students who graduate and the tech companies that come to Miami to leverage those skills will change the very fabric of Miami for decades if not centuries to come,” Griffin said in an interview.

The Miami campus will focus on human health and biological discovery, national security and strategic capabilities, energy and climate resilience, and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation, the university said, making it a fit with the region’s defense tech and healthcare industries. Interdisciplinary programs will integrate artificial intelligence, computing, and machine learning alongside Carnegie Mellon’s humanities, fine arts and design disciplines. The campus will host industry research labs and venture studios so that students, faculty and industry and community partners can build technologies alongside one another. The university said the focus reflects the founding aim of Andrew Carnegie, who established the institution to create a hands-on environment for students to apply their knowledge to industrial challenges and real-world problem solving.

“Miami is an area in which Carnegie Mellon can reinvent not only what students learn, but how they learn,” said Farnam Jahanian, president of Carnegie Mellon.

The donation helps advance Griffin’s aim to establish South Florida as a leading global-business and technology hub, according to the announcement. A spokesman said Griffin has now given $2.4 billion in donations to South Florida, where he moved his firm Citadel’s headquarters, and more than $5.7 billion in total charitable giving.

“I believe that all great American cities are anchored by great universities and Carnegie Mellon will bring a great university here to Miami complementary to other universities here in the region,” Griffin said.

In addition to the donation, Griffin is joining Carnegie Mellon’s Board of Trustees, and the university’s computer science building in Pittsburgh will be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science. Citadel has a history of scooping up talent from Carnegie Mellon, employing a long list of quantitative engineers and other employees who attended the university.

The Miami campus will sit on a site purchased from developer Moishe Mana for an undisclosed sum; details about who ultimately will hold the deed to the 35-acre property were not made public. The new campus will be blocks from Griffin’s other major Wynwood investment—an office tower he and Goldman Properties acquired from Chicago-based Sterling Bay for $180 million. That building houses a 38,400-square-foot options trading floor run by MIAX Sapphire, which opened in September 2025 as the first national securities exchange trading floor in Miami and the second open-outcry trading floor to open in the U.S. in roughly half a century. Citadel Securities is one of the market-makers participating on that floor.

“The thinking is so big, matched with a financial commitment of historic proportions, you just know that the scale of the outcome will be breathtaking,” said Jessica Goldman Srebnick, co-chair of Goldman Properties.

The Wynwood development follows a similar pattern in nearby West Palm Beach, about 70 miles north of Miami, where developer Stephen Ross has poured billions of dollars into office towers, condominiums, retail centers and schools and helped recruit Vanderbilt University’s graduate campus. That program has raised about $400 million from donations, recently doubled its planned student population to 2,000, and will focus on defense tech, finance, space tech and national-security studies when it opens in 2029.