Vanderbilt's SF campus to include arts college funded by $75M from Nvidia's CEO

Vanderbilt University will open a new arts college in San Francisco in fall 2027 with $75 million in backing from Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori, tying the Tennessee school's Bay Area expansion to one of the artificial intelligence boom's biggest fortunes. 

The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design will be "a cornerstone" of Vanderbilt's planned campus on the 4.5-acre Potrero Hill site it is purchasing from California College of the Arts, the university said Tuesday. Vanderbilt announced earlier this year that it plans to enroll roughly 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students there after next year's closure of CCA, which trained painters, sculptors and architects for 120 years in San Francisco and in the East Bay.

Vanderbilt is conducting a nationwide search for an academic dean to lead the Huang College, which will provide an "intellectual environment" blending art and design with engineering and AI.  

The university, which has also been expanding into New York and Florida, suggested that "additional academic programming" will be forthcoming at the CCA site.

Vanderbilt's vision for the new college reflects a shift in how arts education is being imagined in San Francisco. While the city's independent art schools have historically centered on the fine arts with some commercial applications, including architecture, photography and graphic design, Vanderbilt appears to be crafting an interdisciplinary model that connects those traditions with engineering, entrepreneurship and emerging technologies at a moment when artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping creative industries.

At the Huang College, university officials envision a "suite of undergraduate and graduate programs" that will offer students a "rigorous foundation in art, architecture and design" through studio practice, apprenticeships and internships aimed at "diverse career opportunities." 

The new college will also preserve a connection to CCA's arts legacy by housing its Wattis arts research center within a newly established California College of the Arts Institute located at the Huang College. 

Yet Vanderbilt's announcement makes the Huang College sound less like an art school and more like an aesthetics-infused tech curriculum stretching from pencil drawing to electronic innovation.  

"The academic approach will be distinctive, leveraging the latest breakthroughs in advanced technology and grounding students in the foundational domains of art and architecture; developing technical mastery and visual sophistication through studio practice and design labs; and building business and technical fluency through innovation and engineering," the university said in a statement.

The tech-forward emphasis is perhaps unsurprising given that its primary benefactors, Jensen and Lori Huang, are engineers whose fortune arose from the transformational AI company Nvidia, co-founded by Jensen Huang in Santa Clara in 1993. With a value of nearly $5 trillion, it's the world's richest company - though on Friday it was briefly unseated by Apple.

"We are delighted to partner with Vanderbilt University to cultivate the next generation of creators and help San Francisco remain one of the world's great centers of creativity, innovation and culture," Jensen Huang said in a statement, noting that technology and art together "shape civilization."

Vanderbilt professor and artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, put it more poetically: "We are in another moment of fire, in the middle of a spark with this technology, with this new language."

A Vanderbilt spokesperson confirmed that the deal to purchase the CCA property is expected to close by Sept. 1, 2027, but declined to provide financial details about the transaction or specifics about other plans for the site. 

Vanderbilt's bid to acquire the CCA property includes taking over the art school's historic campus in Oakland's Rockridge neighborhood.

The new Huang College will occupy the second floor of 80 Carolina St., around the corner from the San Francisco main campus. 

The Huangs' $75 million donation is a matching gift that has prompted more than $25 million in additional donations from Bay Area investors and Vanderbilt graduates and parents.

This is Jensen Huang's second donation to the arts on this site. His first was to the CCA in early 2025 while the school was still raising money and expecting to remain open. It generated some controversy after Nvidia and CCA announced they were creating an "Incubator for Creative Intelligence" funded by $22.5 million from the Huangs' foundation and another $22 million raised by the college. 

In its "frequently asked questions" about that deal, CCA addressed an array of concerns from  faculty and students, such as that "Nvidia's focus on AI seems like it is at odds with the creative field of artists who make up CCA" and that "aside from the toll this will take on artists, the environmental impacts (of AI) are devastating."

In its responses, CCA promised that "no one will be forced to use AI" and that artists might "contribute to the development of novel ideas and solutions" to AI's environmental impacts. 

Less than a year later, the college announced it was closing. 

The Huangs' new donation and the new, tech-infused arts program received high praise from local patrons of the arts.  

Among the donors identified by the university is Katie Schwab Paige, who serves on boards that include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the charity founded by Mayor Daniel Lurie, Tipping Point Community. Paige, a Vanderbilt graduate (Class of '97), is also a San Francisco neighbor of the Huangs.

"San Francisco has long been a place where artists, makers and visionaries have challenged convention and shaped culture," Paige said in a statement. "Vanderbilt's new campus will honor that remarkable legacy while creating new opportunities at the intersection of arts, technology, and design."

Vanderbilt's arrival advances one of Lurie's economic priorities: attracting a prestigious national university willing to invest in San Francisco as the city works to revive its economy. Although Vanderbilt chose a campus south of downtown - rather than in the city's core, where Lurie had hoped another university campus would help fill vacant offices - City Hall embraced the deal as a vote of confidence at a time when AI startups account for much of the city's new leasing activity.

"Arts and creativity are central to San Francisco's identity and essential to our future," Lurie said in a statement, describing Vanderbilt's announcement as an "incredible investment" in the city that "reflects growing confidence in our city core."

Vanderbilt is widely regarded as a "Southern Ivy" - a prestigious university that accepted just 5% of applicants last fall, compared to Stanford's 4% and UC Berkeley's 11%.

The university said that neither tuition nor specific degree offerings - or even how many students it will enroll - have been decided for the Huang College. 

Undergraduate tuition at its home campus in Nashville is just under $70,000 a year before fees, room and board.

Christopher Bedford, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, described the city as a "major epicenter of arts education in the United States" and said the museum will support the new school's efforts to help "future generations discover the power and opportunity within artistic practice."

The San Francisco campus is part of Vanderbilt's broader expansion beyond Nashville, including new academic operations in New York and plans for a graduate campus in Florida. 

"Location becomes a strategy," Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier told Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch, who noted in an article that the chancellor "is widely perceived within higher ed as trying to elbow into the Harvard-Yale-Stanford stratum."

Meanwhile, CCA is entering its final year and did not respond to Chronicle inquiries about how many students are expected to be displaced by its closure.

Vanderbilt has said it cannot commit to accommodating students who have not yet graduated, while CCA has directed those students toward transfer options at other institutions.

The pending closure of California College of the Arts, along with the 2022 closure of the 151-year-old San Francisco Art Institute, will leave the city with just one independent art school: the for-profit Academy of Art University. That school has faced controversies including being placed on accreditation warning this year for failing to graduate students in a timely manner, settling a lawsuit in 2021 alleging it had engaged in fraudulent recruitment practices, and in 2020 having to pay the city nearly $38 million to replace housing units the city said it had illegally removed from the market.

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