Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged a donation of $50 million to Sacramento State University. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the gift on January 28 and tied it to a redevelopment of three vacant state office buildings on Sacramento’s Capitol Mall. The donation came just weeks after the couple announced a major shift in the focus of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), directing most of its philanthropic efforts toward biomedical AI research and scientific discovery.
The gift from Zuckerberg and Chan was aimed to fund abatement, demolition and initial construction of a new downtown campus, Fortune reports. The move signals a broader strategy that mirrors Zuckerberg’s aggressive push into AI both at Meta and through the family’s charitable ventures. The money, from Zuckerberg and Meta, will make room for new student housing alongside academic space, including state-of-the-art STEM labs and an AI center.
Earlier this year, California Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a $50 million gift from Zuckerberg and Meta tied to the redevelopment of three vacant state office buildings on Sacramento’s Capitol Mall. The initiative launched in 2015 with a pledge to give away 99 percent of the couple’s fortune. The donation also arrives as California considers a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires’ wealth. He owns a compound of 11 properties in Palo Alto’s Crescent Park neighbourhood, valued at more than $110 million, and Meta has a 57-acre headquarters campus nearby, plus more than 400,000 square feet of office space in Menlo Park.
As reported by Fortune, the funding made by Meta CEO and his wife will help support the abatement, demolition and initial construction work for a new downtown campus of Sacramento State University. Priscilla Chan, announced late last year that they would move most of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) toward AI-powered biomedical research.
The project is also said to include student housing, STEM-focused academic facilities along with a dedicated AI centre. Meta has committed to spending between $115 billion and $135 billion on building “superintelligent” agents for feeds, ads and commerce, and the Sacramento gift helps build the talent pipeline for such jobs. Biohub, meanwhile, is focused on “frontier AI” and “frontier biology,” using large-scale models for virtual cells, immune reprogramming and disease prediction.
The gift comes after Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. It has since moved away from its original focus on education and social justice, though the couple say they will continue to make other local donations. Fortune notes that several prominent billionaires, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Craft Ventures’ David Sacks, have already moved their permanent residences out of state to avoid it. Zuckerberg has made no public statement about the tax and is instead putting more money into California. Fortune sees a common thread between Zuckerberg’s business and his giving. In a November blog post, Zuckerberg and Chan wrote that they are very excited about the decade ahead and expect challenges as well as progress toward some of humanity’s long-term dreams.