{"id":411259,"date":"2026-07-24T21:48:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T21:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/411259\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T21:48:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T21:48:13","slug":"nvidia-ceo-pours-75m-into-san-francisco-art-campus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/411259\/","title":{"rendered":"Nvidia CEO Pours $75M Into San Francisco Art Campus"},"content":{"rendered":"

News<\/a><\/p>\n

Vanderbilt University’s building on the ruins of the California College of the Arts will bear the billionaire’s name <\/p>\n


\n \"Isa
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\"Nvidia
\n Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang on January 5, 2026 (photo Patrick T. Fallon\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Vanderbilt University’s new San Francisco arts and design campus will bear the name of Nvidia co-founder Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang after the billionaire committed millions to the institution. <\/p>\n

The university announced this week that the AI chipmaker and his wife, Lori Huang, gifted $75 million to establish the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design.<\/p>\n

The controversial campus will replace the nearly 120-year-old California College of the Arts<\/a> (CCA), San Francisco’s last remaining private art school. The beloved nonprofit institution, which grants bachelor’s and master’s degrees across artistic disciplines, was purchased by Vanderbilt amid financial struggles caused by a decline in enrollment and a growing budget deficit.<\/p>\n

The Huangs donated a $22.5 million<\/a> matching gift to CCA in February 2025 to help stabilize the institution’s shaky finances. However, not even a full year later, CCA announced that it would cease operating after the 2026\u20132027 academic year, and that the Potrero Hill campus would be subsumed by Vanderbilt. <\/p>\n

Not everyone in the local art community is happy with Huang’s donation. “These billionaires would much rather play God and remake our art schools in their own image than support a 120-year-old legacy fine art school,” Lindsey White, a San Francisco-based artist, educator, and CCA alum, told Hyperallergic.<\/p>\n

“In both CCA and SFAI<\/a> cases, billionaires with zero experience in the arts have taken over major real estate, leaving local artists, educators, and workers in a dystopian nightmare,” White continued. “Sadly, it seems our local government didn’t see the value in saving the last fine art school in Northern California either.”<\/p>\n

California Governor Gavin Newsom had worked to secure a $20 million public grant<\/a> in 2025 to keep the private institution afloat despite significant opposition from state lawmakers. At the time, the governor argued<\/a> that though it was atypical for the government to fund a private college, the state should fund CCA to safeguard its cultural sector amid Trump’s attacks on the arts. He later expressed shock<\/a> at the school’s closure, but critics said he should’ve seen it coming. <\/p>\n

Huang co-founded Nvidia, a manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs) now widely used to power artificial intelligence programs, in a Denny’s restaurant booth in 1993. In May, the chipmaker reached a valuation of $5.5 trillion<\/a>, the highest in the history of publicly traded companies. <\/p>\n

According to the university’s announcement<\/a>, the Huangs donated the large sum out of their belief that “creative practice [is] one of innovation\u2019s most essential engines.”<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology expands what we can build,” Jensen Huang said in the press release issued earlier this week. “Art and design\u00a0determine\u00a0why we build it. Together they shape civilization.”<\/p>\n

In an op-ed about the closure of CCA in the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a> earlier this year, local gallerist Griff Williams warned that “corporate interests seem to eclipse all else in San Francisco.”<\/p>\n

“Mayor Lurie, the closure of the California College of the\u00a0Arts is a tragedy for the city, not a ‘win,'” he wrote. “It\u2019s another blow to the legacy of the heroes who made San Francisco unique: Joan Brown, David Ireland, Bruce\u00a0Conner, Hung Liu, Hank Willis Thomas, Dewey Crumpler, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Harrell Fletcher, Jim Goldberg, Viola Frey, Ted Purves, Dodie Bellamy\u00a0and Susan O\u2019Malley, to name a few.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News Vanderbilt University’s building on the ruins of the California College of the Arts will bear the billionaire’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-411259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}