The struggling California College of the Arts (CCA), founded in 1907 in the San Francisco Bay Area, has pulled itself out of immediate financial peril with a $45 million fundraising campaign. Half the funds come from the cofounder of Nvidia, the tech company that, among its other specialties, is a leading supplier of chips used to power artificial intelligence. 

The school raised $22.5 million from more than 50 donors, including the entire current board of trustees, some former trustees, and alumni; that amount was matched by the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation. Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang is the cofounder and CEO of Nvidia and the world’s 16th-richest person at time of writing, per Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. Also at time of writing, the company had a market capitalization of $2.88 trillion. (Its stock dropped in value Monday on reports that its A.I. chips are reaching China despite U.S. export controls.)

The college was in dire straits as recently as the summer, when president David Howse informed staff in a memo of possible layoffs and a potential merger with another school, reporting that the school faced a $20 million deficit owing to a one-third dropoff in enrollment since 2019, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle.  

The opening reception of the BFA fine art senior exhibition at the Novack Gallery at CCA’s expanded campus. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno/CCA.

The school did lay off 23 employees, or 10 percent of its staff, and eliminated some roles that were open at the time, comprising another 4.5 percent of total staff positions, per a September memo.

The layoffs came at about the same moment the school settled a lawsuit brought in 2021 by J.D. Beltran, an artist and former faculty member, who sued the institution and an associate provost for firing her after she blew the whistle on alleged financial misdealings and filed a harassment complaint. Among other revelations, the suit alleged that in March 2019, she discovered that nearly $180,000 of funding promised to the Center for Art and Public Life, in which she was employed, was missing.

At the time of the layoffs, the school was also about to open a $123-million expansion overseen by Studio Gang that added 82,300 square feet of studio, classroom, and exhibition space. 

San Francisco mayor London Breed delivers remarks at California College of the Arts during the opening celebration of CCA’s expanded campus. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno/CCA.

Howse approached the Huang Foundation to cultivate a gift in the fall, he explained in a phone call. Huang, wanting to “leverage” his gift to inspire broad support, challenged the school to match his donation, which is among the largest individual gifts, if not the largest, that the school has ever received. The board quickly met the challenge, said Howse.

“The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation recognizes the essential intersection of technology, art, and design in driving innovation,” said Eric Jensen, chief operating officer at the foundation, in press materials. “Our investment in CCA reflects our commitment to supporting institutions that cultivate the creative leaders of tomorrow, and that do so in the Bay Area, which continues to be recognized around the world for its creativity in so many different sectors.”

While some in Huang’s generation of tech billionaires, like Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul G. Allen, built vast art collections full of masterpieces, younger tech wealth has mostly not made a priority of supporting culture (and Huang, 62, is not known as a collector). Writing about arts philanthropy for Artnet News in 2020, Art Funders Forum director Melissa Cowley Wolf noted: “The elephant in the room is who is not in the room: Silicon Valley, and its huge pool of wealth, is not engaged with cultural philanthropy because they do not see the impact it has on the world.”

California College of the Arts. A view of the lower and upper-level Maker Yard, the Hooper Pavilion, and the main building. Photo: Jason O’ Rear.

Despite the school’s position at a major center of the tech industry, few of its board come from that sector. It is headed by Lorna Meyer Calas, a managing director and private wealth advisor at Merrill Lynch, seconded by vice-chair Calvin B. Wheeler, of Kaiser Permanente; other members come from fields including banking, venture capital, marketing, and construction. Just two come from tech: Catherine Courage, VP of ads and user experience at Google, and Nancy S. Forster, a retired consultant and former salesperson with IBM. 

“We hope this will serve to encourage others from the tech sector to get more actively involved in supporting culture,” said Howse. “There are many individuals who are actively engaged in collecting and board service, but there is more opportunity. We hope this opens up more doors.”

It might be seen as ironic that a billionaire whose wealth comes partly from A.I. hardware has come to the aid of an art school, since artists have pushed back at A.I. companies for using their work without compensation (even leading to measures like class action lawsuits), and there is widespread discussion at art schools about potential threats posed by artificial intelligence.

Students at the entrance of CCA’s campus. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno/CCA.

CCA’s revelation of its financial troubles came a year after another school in the same city, the then-151-year-old San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. That school had expanded from its longtime home in the Russian Hill neighborhood to a campus in the Fort Mason complex. The original SFAI campus, including a famed Diego Rivera mural, was bought in 2024 by group of investors led by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, the wife of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, with the hopes of restoring it as a nonprofit arts institute. 

The Chronicle points out that many SFAI students transferred to CCA, which SFAI’s closure left as the only remaining accredited nonprofit art college in Northern California. But enrollment was down to 1,400 in fall 2023, down from a peak of 1,800 students in 2019, and projections for fall semester are as low as 1,250 full-time students, said the paper, which points out that the school is reliant on tuition, fees, and housing for some 85 percent of its $75 million operating budget, and that its $40 million endowment generates just $2 million a year toward operating expenses.

The contagion among art schools is nationwide. Also in 2024, the storied Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced that it would close its college in 2025. In the same city, the nearly 150-year-old University of the Arts closed its doors in 2024, shuttering with one week’s notice and triggering a review by the state attorney general. In 2023, the Art Institutes, a nationwide network of for-profit colleges, announced that it would abruptly shutter its eight remaining campuses. Enrollment at MFA programs, Artnet News reported in 2015, was dropping after a decade of growth.

Howse called the Huang gift “transformational,” “incredible,” and “a milestone,” but also tempered his enthusiasm. “It addresses the short-term challenge but doesn’t solve the long-term problem. We will move quickly into raising additional funds to invest in people, in the campus, and in our program, in order to attract more students.”

The layoffs were “a very painful reality for us,” he said. “We’re seeing that happen across higher education. But the news here is that we’ve been able to find the resources to mitigate that from happening again in the near future.”