California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled the gift on Jan. 28, tying it to a major redevelopment of three vacant state office buildings on Sacramento’s Capitol Mall into a downtown campus. The gift from Zuckerberg and Meta will fund abatement, demolition, and initial construction of the campus, enabling new student housing alongside new academic spaces, including STEM facilities and an AI center.
Zuckerberg hasn’t made any public statements about the billionaires tax, and is instead doubling down on California investments and legacy.
Newsom said Zuckerberg’s gift allows the Sacramento-based school to continue to build its talent pipeline for tech jobs.
The donation “[opens] doors for students to succeed and for our communities to prosper,” Newsom said. “Making sure students can actually afford to live where they learn is essential to that work.”
While this recent donation comes directly from Meta and Zuckerberg, it also fits into the playbook they recently rewrote. Launched in 2015 with a pledge to give away 99% of their fortune, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has recently refocused on science, AI, and biomedical research, shifting emphasis away from its initial education and social justice priorities (although they say they’ll continue making other local donations).
In 2025, Zuckerberg and Chan laid the groundwork to recalibrate their philanthropic organization toward AI-powered biomedical research, with a particular focus on their flagship Biohub network. Biohub, a growing network of biomedical research institutes, aims to “cure or prevent all disease,” according to Zuckerberg and Chan.
The Sacramento AI center mirrors this playbook: infrastructure for training AI talent, akin to Biohub’s shared research tools, rather than one-off scholarships or smaller, incremental donations.
Zuckerberg is using a similar playbook in both his business and philanthropic ventures. Meta is committed to spending between $115 billion and $135 billion on building “superintelligent” agents to meet user needs across feeds, ads, and commerce, and is also investing in its community to build talent pipelines to fill those roles, as evidenced by its most recent donation.
CZI is also going all-in on AI-focused research and outcomes, with Biohub similarly focused on “frontier AI” and “frontier biology,” using large-scale models for virtual cells, immune reprogramming, and disease prediction.
All of these efforts suggest Zuckerberg has framed 2026 as AI’s transformative year for work at both Meta and CZI.
“We are very excited about the decade ahead,” Zuckerberg and Chan wrote in the November blog post. “There will be many challenges, but we believe that achieving some of humanity’s long-term dreams will also come within reach.”
