Billionaire Michael Dell started his company in his University of Texas dorm room. Now, he’s betting on AI with a $750 million gift

12 hours ago 2

Michael Dell is having one of his biggest philanthropic years yet, having announced a major gift to his alma mater on the heels of a $6.25 billion pledge to seed “Trump Accounts.”

The Dell Technologies founder and his wife, Susan Dell, announced Tuesday a $750 million gift to the University of Texas at Austin to fund a new medical center and research campus built around AI from the ground up. This marks one of the largest donations ever given to a public university in the U.S., and it also pushes the Dells’ UT Austin donations to more than $1 billion.

This is a full-circle moment for Dell, who founded the now $140 billion tech company in his dorm room at UT Austin in 1984.

“What makes this moment so meaningful is the opportunity to build something that brings every part of the journey together—from how students learn, to how discoveries are made, to how care reaches families,” the Dells said in a statement. The gift will bring together medicine, science, and computing in one campus “designed for the AI era,” they added.