Topline
Nvidia director and venture capitalist Mark Stevens and his wife Mary are donating $175 million to establish the Mark & Mary Stevens School of Medicine, a joint venture between Sutter Health and Santa Clara University that will be the first new medical school in the San Francisco Bay Area in more than 100 years—10 days after the couple committed $200 million to the University of Southern California to fund its AI research.
Mark Stevens
Photo by Nancy Rothstein/Courtesy of Mark Stevens
Key Facts
The gift is the largest ever received by both Santa Clara University and nonprofit Sutter Health, according to a joint statement issued Friday.
The 82,000-square-foot campus will be built in Santa Clara, roughly two miles from Nvidia’s headquarters, and will house classrooms, simulation rooms and an anatomy lab.
The school plans to enroll about 120 students per class and will open after completing a multiyear accreditation process.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, also a Santa Clara alum, called the partnership “a new model for medical education built to support a more innovative, connected healthcare system.”
Mary Stevens graduated from Santa Clara University in 1984, and the couple previously gave nearly $40 million toward the school’s athletics facilities.
Forbes Valuation
Stevens’ fortune is worth $12.5 billion, built largely on an early Nvidia bet, according to Forbes estimates. He was an investor at venture firm Sequoia Capital where he made early investments in Google, PayPal and LinkedIn before founding investment firm S-Cubed Capital. Stevens also owns a minority stake in the Golden State Warriors NBA basketball team.
Key Background
The donation comes just 10 days after Stevens announced a separate $200 million gift to his own alma mater, USC—where the School of Advanced Computing within the Viterbi School of Engineering will be renamed the Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. That gift, unlike the Bay Area medical school donation, will fund faculty recruitment and AI applications across numerous disciplines including health sciences, security, business and the arts. The Stevens gifts are part of a striking cluster of AI-focused mega-donations in recent weeks. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation committed $750 million to the University of Texas at Austin in April for what UT is billing as the country’s first “AI-native” medical center, along with undergraduate scholarships and computing infrastructure. The University of Wisconsin–Madison also received $100 million in private gift commitments last month for its new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, set to launch July 1, 2026—its first new academic division in more than 40 years. Fellow Nvidia board director Tench Coxe donated $100 million in January from his $8.6 billion fortune to help launch a medical center at the University of Texas at Austin.