Carnegie Mellon University just received a historic $3 billion donation from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin.
Carnegie Mellon, which is located in Pittsburgh, announced the gift Wednesday morning. The university says it intends to use $2 billion to open a new campus in Miami, called Carnegie Mellon University Miami.
“We are deeply grateful to Ken Griffin for his extraordinary vision, partnership and belief in what Carnegie Mellon can achieve,” CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement.
Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027 and should be open to new students in 2028, presuming there are no major regulatory hurdles, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Griffin bought the 35 acres in Wynwood, Florida, where the university will be built, for $1.1 billion from real estate developer Moishe Mana.
Mana said that the sale is the largest land assemblage deal in Florida history.
The campus is expected to support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master's and PhD students, plus approximately 300 faculty members and more than 600 staff.
The university said in a statement that the new school will focus its education on confronting “societal challenges” rather than on traditional academic majors.
The statement said it will focus on “challenge areas spanning human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.”
The university reportedly had to “rethink” how it operates to respond to the rise of AI.
“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,” Jahanian said.
The final $1 billion of the donation will go to support Carnegie Mellon's Pittsburgh campus. Approximately half will be used to boost the university's highest priority needs, and another half will be invested in its School of Computer Science, which will be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science in his honor.
CMU said that the donation is the largest individual donor gift ever given to a university. Before Griffin’s gift, the largest individual donation to a university was Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins University in 2018.
This isn’t Griffin’s first investment in South Florida. He attended high school in the region, and moved Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022. He explained the move at the time by insisting that Florida had a better corporate environment than Illinois.
He said earlier this year he planned to give fewer resources to Citadel’s presence in New York and more to its efforts in South Florida. He made that decision following a public spat with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani over a wealth tax in April.
While discussing his proposed tax in April, Mamdani called out Griffin directly, noting that he maintained a $238 million penthouse in the city while others were struggling to find homes due to a lack of affordable housing.
“We went to Miami and revised our building plan to make it a bigger office building,” Griffin said in May. “What the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners, and principally my New York partners, is that we need to double down on our bet in Miami.”
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