Hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin donates $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon as part of his bet on Florida
Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin is doubling down on Miami, announcing on Wednesday a $3 billion donation to help fund a new campus for Carnegie Mellon University in the city.
The staggering amount is the largest-ever gift by an individual in higher education, surpassing Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins University in 2018. And Griffin’s donation will be split: $1 billion will support CMU’s original campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and $2 billion will help launch CMU’s Miami campus.
CMU Miami is expected to launch in the city’s Wynwood neighborhood in 2028, and it will “pioneer a new model for higher education,” according to a Carnegie Mellon press release.
The university said the campus will organize learning around “societal challenges” rather than traditional academic majors. 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 press release said.
Griffin’s massive investment comes as the hedge fund billionaire has increasingly shifted his money and business interests to South Florida. As founder and CEO of multinational hedge fund Citadel, he moved his business’s headquarters from Chicago and recently said he would redirect investments from New York City to Miami.
Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence has also sparked growing fears that a traditional four-year college education will become obsolete.
“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,” said CMU President Farnam Jahanian in a statement.
As part of the donation, CMU’s School of Computer Science will be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.
Construction is slated to begin next year. Once completed, the Miami campus will support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and PhD students, the press release said.
Griffin has bet big on South Florida, where he attended high school. After three decades in Chicago, Citadel moved its global headquarters to Miami in 2022.
In a letter to employees at the time, Griffin said that he viewed Florida as a better corporate environment.
Earlier this year, Griffin said he planned to expand his business further in Miami, redirecting resources away from his New York offices after a high-profile spat with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over a wealth tax.
In April, Mamdani stood outside a luxury skyscraper for a video announcing the city’s plan for a so-called pied-à-terre tax on second homes of the city’s wealthiest residents. In the video, Mamdani singled out Griffin’s $238 million penthouse.
In response, Griffin called the video “creepy and weird.”
“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.”
