Vanderbilt University’s new arts and design campus in San Francisco will carry the name of Nvidia co-founder Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang after the billionaire pledged millions to the institution.
The university said this week that the AI chipmaker and his wife, Lori Huang, gave $75 million to launch the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design.
The controversial campus will take the place of the nearly 120-year-old California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco’s last remaining private art school. The nonprofit institution, which awards bachelor’s and master’s degrees in artistic disciplines, was acquired by Vanderbilt after enrollment fell and budget deficits deepened. In February 2025, the Huangs made a $22.5 million matching donation to CCA to help shore up its finances, but less than a year later the school announced it would shut down after the 2026–2027 academic year and that the Potrero Hill campus would be absorbed by Vanderbilt.
The move has not been welcomed by everyone in the local art community. “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. White added, “In both CCA and SFAI cases, billionaires with zero experience in the arts have taken over major real estate, leaving local artists, educators, and workers in a dystopian nightmare,” and said that “our local government didn’t see the value in saving the last fine art school in Northern California either.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom had sought a $20 million public grant in 2025 to keep the private college open despite strong resistance from state lawmakers. At the time, he argued that although state support for a private college was unusual, CCA should be funded to protect the cultural sector amid Trump’s attacks on the arts. He later said he was shocked by the closure, though critics argued the outcome should have been expected.
Huang co-founded Nvidia, a maker of graphics processing units (GPUs) now widely used to run artificial intelligence programs, in a Denny’s restaurant booth in 1993. In May, the company reached a valuation of $5.5 trillion, the highest ever for a publicly traded company. The university said the Huangs made the donation because they believe that “creative practice [is] one of innovation’s most essential engines.” Jensen Huang added in the press release, “Technology expands what we can build. Art and design determine why we build it. Together they shape civilization.”
In a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed earlier this year about CCA’s closure, local gallerist Griff Williams warned that “corporate interests seem to eclipse all else in San Francisco.” He wrote, “Mayor Lurie, the closure of the California College of the Arts is a tragedy for the city, not a ‘win.’” Williams called it “another blow to the legacy of the heroes who made San Francisco unique,” and cited Joan Brown, David Ireland, Bruce Conner, Hung Liu, Hank Willis Thomas, Dewey Crumpler, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Harrell Fletcher, Jim Goldberg, Viola Frey, Ted Purves, Dodie Bellamy and Susan O’Malley, among others.
