Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, CEO and co-CIO, Citadel, is putting more money into Miami, announcing Wednesday a $3 bn donation to support a new Carnegie Mellon University campus in the city.
Carnegie Mellon said the gift is the largest ever made by an individual to higher education. It exceeds Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 bn donation to Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Griffin will direct $1 bn to Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus and $2 bn to launch the university’s Miami campus.
CMU Miami is scheduled to open in Wynwood in 2028. Carnegie Mellon said the campus will pioneer a new model for higher education.
The university plans to organize learning around societal challenges instead of traditional majors. Carnegie Mellon said the campus will focus on human health and biological discovery, national security and strategic capabilities, energy and climate resilience, and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.
Griffin’s donation adds to his broader shift toward South Florida. He founded and leads Citadel, and he has moved more of his money and business interests to the region.
Citadel relocated its headquarters from Chicago to Miami, and Griffin recently said he would redirect investment away from New York City and toward Miami.
The announcement also arrives as artificial intelligence keeps reshaping the debate around higher education. Rising concern over AI has fueled questions about whether the traditional four-year college model will hold its value in the years ahead.
As part of the gift, Carnegie Mellon will rename its School of Computer Science as the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science. Construction on the Miami campus is expected to begin next year.
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.
Carnegie Mellon President Farnam Jahanian
Once completed, the Miami campus will serve more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and PhD students, according to the university.
Griffin has spent years building his presence in South Florida, where he attended high school. Citadel moved its global headquarters to Miami in 2022 after three decades in Chicago.
In a letter to employees at the time, Griffin said Florida offered a stronger corporate environment. Earlier this year, he said he planned to expand his business footprint in Miami and shift resources away from his New York offices after a public dispute with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over a proposed wealth tax.
In April, Mamdani stood outside a luxury skyscraper in a video announcing the city’s proposed pied-a-terre tax on second homes owned by wealthy residents. In the video, he pointed to Griffin’s $238mn penthouse.
Griffin answered by calling the video “creepy and weird.” In May, he said Citadel had revised its Miami building plans to create a larger office there because New York’s political climate had pushed his partners to deepen their bet on Miami.
