Carnegie Mellon University Is Coming to Wynwood — Ken Griffin's $3 Billion Gift Will Build Miami's Next Great Campus

Miami just made history. Carnegie Mellon University and Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, announced today a $3 billion gift — the largest individual gift in the history of higher education — that will fund a full CMU campus in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood. The announcement positions Miami at the center of the next era of American innovation.

Of the $3 billion total, $2 billion will launch CMU Miami — a comprehensive university campus on more than 35 acres in Wynwood. The remaining $1 billion will support CMU's Pittsburgh campus, including a $500 million investment in its top-ranked School of Computer Science, which will be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.

CMU Miami won't look like a traditional university. Rather than organizing around academic majors, the campus will be built around societal grand challenges — human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation. Interdisciplinary teams of students, researchers, industry leaders, and government partners will work side by side in what CMU describes as a "living laboratory."

The campus will also include space for industry research labs and venture studios, creating a built-in pipeline between academic discovery and real-world application. CMU President Farnam Jahanian called it a response to "one of the defining intellectual developments of our time" — artificial intelligence — and a chance to rethink how universities educate students and partner with the world around them.

Construction is slated to begin in 2027, with the first students enrolling in 2028. Once complete, the campus will support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master's, and PhD students, nearly 300 faculty, and over 600 staff members. For Wynwood — a neighborhood already defined by creative reinvention — the arrival of a world-class research university marks a generational shift.

Raul Moas, President of the Partnership for Miami, called the gift "an investment in Miami's future on a generational scale," adding: "A full Carnegie Mellon University campus devoted to solving society's grand challenges places Miami at the forefront of human advancement. Wynwood is a beautiful and fitting home. It is a neighborhood that has become a proving ground for Miami's creativity and ambition, and it will now be a place where the world's future innovators are formed."

Griffin himself framed the gift as a civic act as much as a philanthropic one: "The opportunity to bring Carnegie Mellon to Miami places our city at the heart of humanistic and scientific advancement. CMU Miami represents a generational opportunity to build a new center of research and intellectual life — one that will attract exceptional students, scholars, and researchers from across the globe."

Carnegie Mellon is no stranger to firsts. The university established the world's first drama program, robotics institute, human-computer interaction institute, and department of engineering and public policy, as well as the nation's first computer science college. It currently ranks No. 3 nationally in graduate earnings by academic major, No. 1 in undergraduate computer science, and among the top five in 17 undergraduate specialty categories in the 2027 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Griffin will also join Carnegie Mellon's Board of Trustees as part of the commitment. The gift is the largest of his career and reflects the priorities of Griffin Catalyst, his civic engagement initiative focused on education, healthcare, and the arts.

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