Michael Dell is enjoying one of his biggest philanthropic years yet, having announced a major donation to his alma mater shortly after pledging $6.25 billion to fund the “Trump Accounts.”
The founder of Dell Technologies and his wife, Susan Dell, announced a $750 million gift to the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, intended to fund a new medical center and research campus built from the ground up around AI. This is one of the largest donations ever made to a public university in the United States and brings the Dells’ total contributions to UT Austin to more than $1 billion.
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This is a turning point for Dell, who founded the now $140 billion technology company in his UT Austin dorm room in 1984.
“What makes this moment so meaningful is the opportunity to build something that brings together all parts of this journey — from how students learn to how discoveries are made to how care reaches families,” the Dells said in a statement. The donation will bring together medicine, science and computing on a single campus “designed for the AI era,” they added.
What is Dell Medical Center like?
UT Dell Medical Center is expected to open in 2030 on a campus spanning more than 121 acres. It will connect “prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and discovery through AI and advanced computing — enabling earlier detection, more accurate and personalized care, and better health outcomes,” according to the university.
The medical center will include a 300- to 500-bed hospital, outpatient units and a full emergency room, as well as a research campus focused on integrating advanced computing and AI into clinical care, university officials told local Austin outlet KUT News.
The donation will also support graduate scholarships, student housing and the university’s Texas Advanced Computing Center, which is building the nation’s largest academic supercomputer using Dell’s AI infrastructure.
The $750 million donation is deeply personal for Dell, whose net worth is estimated at $177 billion, making him the seventh richest man in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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He founded Dell Technologies from his dorm room at UT Austin, where he had enrolled as a pre-med student to please his parents. But Dell was always fascinated by computers and technology, having disassembled an Apple II model at the age of 15 to understand how it worked, according to the 1999 biography “Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry”.
Dell was 19 years old when he began selling personal computer upgrade kits to other students in his dorm, a move that launched his technology empire.
He had just $1,000 to invest in the business, and his manufacturing team was made up of “three guys with screwdrivers sitting at about six-foot desks,” he said in Direct From Dell. It was this appetite for risk that ultimately led to his success.
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“You have to embrace risk and accept failure,” Dell told Fortune in a 2017 interview.
“If you really want to get there, you better create something unique,” continued Dell. “It has to be different — something no one else is doing.”
Dell ended up dropping out of UT Austin before his sophomore year, and the same dorm will be renamed “Dell House” in his honor, according to KUT News.
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“I see this as the next step in a timeline that actually starts when my parents sent me to UT to become a doctor,” Dell told CNBC. “Obviously, that part didn’t work out, but I never stopped thinking about it.”
Local news outlets also reported that Dell joked at a press conference that his parents’ plan for him to be a doctor “went off the rails” but that “so far, it’s worked out.”
The Dells have been building this momentum for nearly two decades. The couple’s foundation committed $25 million in 2005 to help build Dell Children’s Medical Center, which opened in 2007 as the region’s first freestanding children’s hospital. They contributed $50 million in 2013 to launch the Dell Medical School at UT Austin.
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Billionaires donating to higher education
The donation to UT comes on the heels of another major philanthropic move by the couple: pledging $6.25 billion to fund “the” new investment vehicles created under President Donald Trump’s tax law that would give children born between 2025 and 2028 an initial $1,000 contribution from the government.
“It will certainly be the largest donation we’ve ever made,” Dell told Fortune journalist Diane Brady in December. “Our philanthropy so far has given about $3 billion, and that’s more than double that. We’re working on some other initiatives that we’re not ready to announce yet, but there are more to come.”
The Dells’ contribution is intended for about 25 million American children under age 10 who were born before January 1, 2025, and therefore do not qualify for the initial federal contribution.
Dell said even a small amount increases a child’s likelihood of going to college — “maybe the University of Texas or another large institution” — and eventually starting a family or starting a business.
The Dells’ donations join an elite group of recent mega-donations by billionaires to higher education.
Nike co-founder Phil Knight in 2025 pledged $2 billion to Oregon Health & Science University’s cancer institute, and Michael Bloomberg in 2024 donated $1 billion to Johns Hopkins to cover medical school tuition.
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, meanwhile, has also focused on AI and education, including donating $350 million to MIT to launch the Schwarzman College of Computing, and MacKenzie Scott has donated more than $1 billion to historically black colleges and universities.
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