---
title: "Ken Griffin Gives $3 Billion to Carnegie Mellon for a Miami Campus"
description: "The Citadel founder’s gift, the largest by an individual in higher education, splits $2 billion for Miami and $1 billion for Pittsburgh"
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-09-30T09:01:29.261Z
modified: 2026-09-30T19:24:55Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/ken-griffin-gives-3-billion-to-carnegie-mellon-for-a-miami-c-2d7fc0
language: en
tags: ["education", "miami", "citadel", "bloomberg", "ai", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Ken Griffin Gives $3 Billion to Carnegie Mellon for a Miami Campus

*The Citadel founder’s gift, the largest by an individual in higher education, splits $2 billion for Miami and $1 billion for Pittsburgh*

By rews desk · September 30, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/ken-griffin-gives-3-billion-to-carnegie-mellon-for-a-miami-c-2d7fc0

## In brief

- Ken Griffin announced a $3 billion donation to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest individual gift in higher education
- The gift splits $2 billion for a new Miami campus and $1 billion for the Pittsburgh campus
- The Miami campus, in Wynwood, is to open in 2028 and serve more than 3,500 students
- Carnegie Mellon’s computer science school will be renamed for Griffin
- Griffin moved Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022 and clashed this year with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani

Kenneth C. Griffin, the founder and chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, on Wednesday announced a $3 billion donation to Carnegie Mellon University, most of it to build a new campus in Miami — the largest gift by an individual in the history of higher education.

The donation surpasses the previous record, Michael R. Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University in 2018. It will be split: $1 billion for Carnegie Mellon’s original campus in Pittsburgh and $2 billion for the Miami campus, which the university expects to open in the Wynwood neighborhood in 2028. Construction is to begin next year, and the campus will eventually serve more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students, according to a university news release.

The Miami campus will organize learning around “societal challenges” rather than traditional academic majors, the university said — fields including human health and biological discovery, national security, energy and climate resilience, and advanced manufacturing. As part of the gift, the School of Computer Science will be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.

The investment lands at an uneasy moment for universities. The rise of A.I. has fed predictions that the four-year degree is on its way out. “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,” Farnam Jahanian, Carnegie Mellon’s president, said in a statement.

For Mr. Griffin, the gift extends a yearslong migration of his money and business to South Florida, where he attended high school. In 2022, after three decades in Chicago, Citadel moved its global headquarters to Miami. In a letter to employees at the time, Mr. Griffin said he viewed Florida as a better corporate environment.

More recently, the shift has taken on an edge. This spring, after Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City stood outside a luxury skyscraper in a video promoting a so-called pied-à-terre tax on the second homes of the city’s wealthiest residents — singling out Mr. Griffin’s $238 million penthouse — Mr. Griffin called the video “creepy and weird” and said he would redirect resources from New York to Miami.

“We went to Miami and revised our building plan to make it a bigger office building,” he 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.”