In January, the Bay Area’s California College of the Arts announced that it would close in 2027 after selling its two campuses to Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Now, Vanderbilt has revealed that its San Francisco campus will open next year as the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design, named in recognition of a $75 million donation from Nvidia founder Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang and his wife, Lori Huang.
“Technology expands what we can build. Art and design determine why we build it. Together they shape civilization,” Jensen Huang said in a statement. “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.”
Founded in 1907 in Berkeley, CCA was the last nonprofit private art school in San Francisco. In recognition of its 119-year history, Vanderbilt will establish the California College of the Arts Institute, the university announced in a statement. The new institute will reportedly house the current programming of CCA’s main exhibition venue, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; manage the school’s archives; organize events for CCA alumni and the Bay area creative community; and oversee residencies and fellowships for artists, architects, designers, and curators, among others.
Vanderbilt is currently seeking a founding dean to lead the newly christened college.
CCA had long operated at a deficit, estimated by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2024 at approximately $20 million. In a statement earlier this year, the school’s president, David Howse, attributed its closure and the sale of its property to “declining enrollment,” an “unsustainable” tuition model, and “demographic shifts.” According to KQED, 207 undergraduate and 117 graduate students were enrolled at CCA last fall; fewer than 500 students are expected to graduate from CCA before its transition in 2027. Its financial aliments were briefly alleviated in March 2025, when Jensen Huang gave the school $22.5 million, matching a sum raised by more than 50 other donors.
Taiwan-born Jensen Huang is the founder, president, and chief executive of Nvidia, the Santa Clara–headquartered company whose computer chips have helped fuel the burgeoning AI industry. Forbes estimates Huang’s net worth at $178.9 billion, making him the seventh-richest person in the world as of July 2026. He has also become a prolific patron of higher education in recent years, giving $30 million to Stanford University for an engineering center in 2008 and $50 million to Oregon State University for a namesake research center in 2022.
In addition to the Huangs’ $75 million gift, Vanderbilt has raised more than $25 million for its California outpost. The San Francisco campus, slated to open in fall 2027 pending regulatory approval, is part of the university’s broader expansion, which includes planned campuses in New York City and West Palm Beach, Florida, and a quantum computing institute in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
As Bay Area art schools flounder under financial strain, Silicon Valley is increasingly stepping in as an influential force in the region’s cultural landscape. The San Francisco Art Institute shuttered in 2022 after filing for bankruptcy amid a deficit and declining enrollment, pressures similar to those facing CCA. Its precarious fate made national headlines, in part because its campus is home to a significant Diego Rivera mural, valued at $50 million. Two years after its closure, the school was acquired by the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’s nonprofit, with plans to reopen it as the California Academy of Studio Arts.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie called CCA’s sale to Vanderbilt a “big day for the city,” but the growing influence of Big Tech on the Bay Area’s art world has not been met with unanimous support from the local creative community.
“For many residents I know, learning about the end of California College of the Arts was a sad day,” wrote Griff Williams, founder of Gallery 16, in a January San Francisco Chronicle op-ed. The gallery has operated in the Bay Area since 1993 and, according to Williams, has recently been fielding interest from venture capitalists. “What San Francisco needs now is immediate, meaningful, long-term commitments not just to art businesses, but to the people in our art community,” he wrote, calling for “affordable housing and meaningful arts funding” in the city budget.
