This is a full-circle moment for Dell, who founded the now $140 billion tech company in his dorm room at UT Austin in 1984.
“What makes this moment so meaningful is the opportunity to build something that brings every part of the journey together—from how students learn, to how discoveries are made, to how care reaches families,” the Dells said in a statement. The gift will bring together medicine, science, and computing in one campus “designed for the AI era,” they added.
The newly branded UT Dell Medical Center is slated to open in 2030 on a 300-plus-acre campus. It will connect “prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and discovery through AI and advanced computing—enabling earlier detection, more precise and personalized care, and better health outcomes,” according to the university.
“If you want to really make it big, you’d better come up with something unique,” Dell continued. “It better be differentiated—that nobody else is doing.”
Local news outlets also reported that Dell joked at a Tuesday press conference his parents’ plan for him to be a doctor “got derailed,” but that “so far, it’s worked out.”
The Dells have been building toward this moment for nearly two decades. Their foundation committed $25 million in 2005 to help build Dell Children’s Medical Center, which opened in 2007 as the region’s first freestanding pediatric hospital. They kicked in $50 million in 2013 to launch the Dell Medical School at UT Austin.
“It’s certainly the largest gift we will have given,” Dell told Fortune’s Diane Brady in December. “Our philanthropy so far has given about $3 billion, and this is more than double that. We’re working on a few other things that we’re not ready to announce, but there is more to come.”
The Dells’ contribution is intended for the roughly 25 million American children under 10 who were born before Jan. 1, 2025, and therefore do not qualify for the federal seed contribution. Dell has said even a small sum makes a child more likely to enter college—“perhaps at the University of Texas or some other great school”—and eventually start a family or business.
