Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, have donated $75 million to Vanderbilt University to help establish a new college focused on art, architecture and design at its planned San Francisco campus. Announced on July 21, 2026, the gift has helped attract additional contributions, taking total philanthropic support for the campus beyond $100 million, according to the university. The campus is expected to open in 2027, subject to regulatory approvals, and will build on the legacy of the California College of the Arts.
The donation will establish the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design, which is intended to bring creative disciplines together with technology, engineering and entrepreneurship.
In May 2026, Reuters reported that the foundation run by Jensen and Lori Huang had purchased computing time from CoreWeave and donated it to universities and nonprofit institutions for scientific and artificial intelligence research. A regulatory filing valued the computing resources donated through that initiative at $108.3 million. Reuters noted that Nvidia had invested $2 billion in CoreWeave and agreed to purchase $6.3 billion in cloud capacity from the company, relationships that had raised investor concerns about potential circular financing.
The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design is intended to make creative disciplines central to Vanderbilt’s San Francisco campus. Its proposed academic model will combine studio practice and design labs with technical education, engineering and entrepreneurship. Huang explained the thinking behind the contribution in Vanderbilt’s announcement, saying, “Technology expands what we can build. Art and design determine why we build it. Together they shape civilization. The initiative reflects the family’s stated belief that artistic creativity and design are important to technological progress, business innovation and the cultural life of a city. The Vanderbilt contribution is separate from another philanthropic initiative involving the couple. Nvidia also planned to provide free engineering services to some recipients. The arrangement involved CoreWeave, a cloud computing company that uses Nvidia-designed graphics processing units for AI workloads. The computing donation and the Vanderbilt gift serve different purposes. The former supports research infrastructure, while the latter backs a new academic institution intended to connect art, design and technology in San Francisco.