Billionaire Jensen Huang pledges $75 million to Vanderbilt University for design college

Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori, have committed $75 million to Vanderbilt University to establish an art, architecture and design college in San Francisco that will carry their names and occupy the campus of the California College of the Arts, which closes next year after nearly 120 years.

Vanderbilt announced the gift on Tuesday. The school will be called the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design and will anchor the Nashville university's planned San Francisco campus.

The money is structured as a matching gift rather than an outright donation. Vanderbilt said the commitment has already drawn additional pledges, bringing total investment past $100 million, and that it has secured more than 40 percent of the funds needed to complete the match by Dec. 31, 2028. Early backers named in the announcement include Katie and Matt Paige, Jeff and Marieke Rothschild, and Leah and Ben Spero, alongside several anonymous donors.

Huang framed the gift around the relationship between engineering and design. "Technology expands what we can build. Art and design determine why we build it," he said in the university's statement. Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said the college would place those disciplines at the centre of the San Francisco campus rather than at its margins.

A campus built on a closing art school

California College of the Arts announced on Jan. 13 that it would wind down operations by the end of the 2026-27 academic year and hand its campus to Vanderbilt. Terms of that transaction were not disclosed.

The college was founded in 1907 in the East Bay and later moved across the bay. It was the last independent nonprofit art and design school in Northern California, enrolling roughly 1,300 students on a 4.5-acre campus in San Francisco's Design District, on the edge of Potrero Hill and Mission Bay. President David Howse told alumni that declining enrolment and a persistent structural deficit had made a tuition-dependent model unsustainable. The school had cut about 10 percent of its staff in September 2024 while working through a budget shortfall of roughly $20 million.

Vanderbilt expects to open in San Francisco for the 2027-28 academic year with about 1,000 students, subject to state and federal regulatory approvals. Provost C. Cybele Raver has launched a national search for an inaugural dean, a post endowed as the Katie and Matt Paige Dean.

A second intervention by the Huangs

This is not the family's first money into the institution. The Huangs put up a $22.5 million matching gift in February 2025, doubling an equivalent sum the college had already raised and temporarily closing its funding gap. Less than a year later, CCA announced it would close.

California Governor Gavin Newsom secured a $20 million state grant for the private college in 2025 over objections from lawmakers, arguing the state had reason to protect its cultural sector. He later said he was taken aback by the closure announcement.

Criticism in the Bay Area

Reaction within the local art community has been mixed. Lindsey White, a San Francisco artist, educator and CCA alumna, told Hyperallergic that "billionaires with zero experience in the arts have taken over major real estate," and drew a line from CCA to the San Francisco Art Institute, which shut in 2022 after a costly campus renovation. A nonprofit endowed by Laurene Powell Jobs bought that campus for $30 million in 2024 and plans to reopen it as a studio programme.

Gallerist Griff Williams wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece this year that corporate interests appeared to be eclipsing everything else in the city. Mayor Daniel Lurie has presented Vanderbilt's arrival as evidence of an economic recovery in a city still absorbing pandemic-era office vacancies.

Vanderbilt has said it will preserve elements of the school it is replacing through a California College of the Arts Institute housed within the new college. That unit will run the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, digitise and expand access to the CCA archives with the university's Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries, and maintain contact with more than 25,000 alumni.

Huang's fortune

Forbes' real-time billionaires list valued Huang at $178.8 billion on Friday, ranking him the seventh-richest person in the world. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, in a conversation that has passed into Silicon Valley folklore as having taken place in a Denny's booth, and holds a little over 3 percent of the company through direct and family trust stakes.

Nvidia traded around $206 a share on Friday, valuing the chipmaker at roughly $5.1 trillion. The stock peaked in mid-May, when the company's market value topped $5.7 trillion, a record for a publicly traded company, and Huang's fortune crossed $200 billion for the first time.

Vanderbilt said the college's degree programmes remain subject to faculty advisory review and regulatory approval, and that it expects to disclose further donor commitments over the coming months.