As Big Tech competes to win the AI race, America’s top universities are also clamoring for the best resources to study and research the technology. And the University of Southern California just got a massive bet from one of the country’s most prominent venture capitalists to place them squarely in the competition.
On Tuesday, USC announced Mark Stevens, a billionaire venture capitalist, Nvidia board member, and Giving Pledge signer, and his wife, Mary, are donating an eye-popping $200 million to launch a universitywide AI initiative.
This marks one of the largest gifts in the school’s 146-year history. In recognition, USC’s School of Advanced Computing, housed within the Viterbi School of Engineering (one of the top engineering schools in the country), will be renamed the USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
“As a top destination for AI talent, USC can accelerate our mission of educating future leaders, addressing real-world problems, and enhancing human values and agency,” USC President Beong-Soo Kim said in a statement.
The $200 million donation will fund the recruitment of AI researchers and back work spanning health sciences, security, business, and the arts.
“We know the next great universities will be those that invest in computing,” Stevens, who is also a USC alum, said in a statement. “This is a key moment.”
Who is Mark Stevens?
Stevens, 66, earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and economics from USC in 1981 and a master’s in computer engineering from the school in 1984, and went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1989.
He joined Sequoia Capital that same year and became a partner in 1993, the year he led Sequoia’s investment in the then-unknown chipmaker Nvidia. Run by Jensen Huang, Nvidia is now considered to be the world’s most valuable company, and has a $5 trillion market cap. Stevens still sits on Nvidia’s board today and runs his own family office, S-Cubed Capital, in Menlo Park, Calif.
During his run at Sequoia, Stevens was part of the team behind early bets on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and Nvidia. He left Sequoia to start S-Cubed Capital in 2012.
His payoff has been substantial, with a net worth of $12.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and he also owns a stake in the Golden State Warriors NBA team.
Giving Pledge signer doubling down on his alma mater
In 2013, Mark and Mary Stevens signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment founded by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates to get more billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth.
“Mary and I realized that we had more than enough wealth that we would ever need and began to think about what to do about it,” Mark Stevens wrote in his Giving Pledge letter. “There were four options: 1) give it to your kids (we have three), 2) let the government take it from you and redistribute it, 3) spend with reckless abandon or 4) donate virtually all of it to causes and organizations that we feel could make a difference in the world.”
“We are thrilled to devote a significant portion of our future time and energy to option four,” he continued.
USC has been a consistent beneficiary. Stevens has served on the school’s Board of Trustees since 2001, and the couple’s prior gifts include $50 million in 2015 to endow the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, which uses imaging tech to study Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and traumatic brain injury, plus earlier naming gifts for the USC Stevens Center for Innovation and the Stevens Academic Center for student-athletes.
The new $200 million pledge will scale up that neuroimaging work and pour resources into USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, a U.S. Army–affiliated research center that uses AI for military training simulations, as well as USC’s new bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence and its AI for Business program.
Universities are racing to keep up
Stevens told the Los Angeles Times that schools risk falling behind if they don’t move fast on AI, especially as much of the cutting-edge research has migrated to private companies.
“I think a lot of American universities are in danger of getting left behind if they don’t invest and raise money to further the AI revolution,” Stevens said. He also acknowledged the technology’s risks, adding “AI in the wrong hands … can be very destructive.”
“I think one of the jobs of universities in America is to understand, have a balanced approach, understand the guardrails and the safeguards that need to be adhered to as AI proliferates,” he continued.
Several other billionaires have also donated to American universities to help them keep up in the AI race. Last month, Michael and Susan Dell donated $750 million to the University of Texas at Austin to fund a medical center built from the ground up around AI, pushing the Dells’ total UT Austin giving past $1 billion.
In January, tech billionaire and Workday cofounder David Duffield gave Cornell University a record-breaking $371.5 million to its engineering school, with a portion earmarked for AI and quantum engineering research, per the Ithaca Voice. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman put $350 million into MIT in 2018 to launch the Schwarzman College of Computing, an AI-focused interdisciplinary hub.
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