Michael and Susan Dell donate $750 million to UT Austin’s medical campus

Michael and Susan Dell announced Tuesday that they have donated $750 million to the University of Texas at Austin to fund the development of a new medical center and research campus.

The billionaire CEO told CNBC that the new medical center, which includes a hospital and research facility, will leverage artificial intelligence and advanced computing to provide faster, more accurate treatment to patients.

“There are a lot of medical centers out there,” Dell said in an interview. “But the opportunity to build something new means we can design it from the ground up, incorporating data, computing, and AI. This allows us to make better decisions faster, coordinate care more effectively, and ultimately produce better outcomes.”

The university plans to break ground on Dell Medical Center later this year and open the facility in 2030. The new medical campus will also include a cancer center already in development. The Dells’ gift will also benefit student scholarships and UT’s supercomputing center.

The couple’s gift is one of the largest in history to an American public university. Dell founded his namesake technology company out of his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, when he was a pre-school student. He dropped out of UT Austin before his sophomore year.

“I look at this as the next step in a timeline that actually goes back to my parents sending me to UT to become a doctor,” he said. “Obviously, that part didn’t work out, but I never stopped thinking about it.”

With their latest efforts, the couple has donated a total of more than $1 billion to UT Austin, including an initial gift of $50 million to establish the Dell School of Medicine in 2013. Their foundation also donated $25 million in 2007 to establish Austin’s first children’s hospital.

Nvidia Tench Cox, a billionaire investor and his wife Simone, both of Austin, donated $100 million to a new academic medical center in January.

Dell said he and his wife are stepping up their giving as Austin’s population continues to grow. According to city data, the population of the city’s metropolitan area has roughly doubled since 2000, with previous estimates pegging it to about 2.6 million people in 2024.

Investing in Austin’s health system will allow residents to receive care closer to home, Dell said.

“My perspective on this is as a parent and as an employer. You know, years ago, if you had a health issue, you didn’t really stay in Austin. You went to Houston or Dallas,” he said. “And that’s becoming less and less true. And now Austin is becoming a destination for specialty surgeries and difficult procedures, and it’s attracting that kind of talent.”

The Dells have stepped up their philanthropic efforts in recent months, donating $6.25 billion to Trump accounts for 25 million children in the United States in December. The couple’s philanthropic contributions to date total more than $10 billion, according to the foundation.

“We’re able to have a bigger impact and we’ve grown in scale,” Dell said of his philanthropy. “We want to do this while we’re still here. And we’re still here. So there’s a lot of work to do.”

Patient advocacy groups and medical professionals have raised concerns about the use of AI in healthcare, including data privacy risks and the potential for bias.

Dell said he prioritizes the ability of AI to assist medical professionals, rather than replace or hinder them.

“We need proper controls and standards when it comes to privacy and security,” he said. “At the end of the day, these are just tools. And they’re very powerful and amazing and will continue to get better. But I still think it’s very important to have human judgment.”