What Happens to All the Jensen Huang Buildings Now?

What Happens to All the Jensen Huang Buildings Now? By , an Emmy Award–winning Curbed writer who has reported on New York City for four years Jensen and Lori Huang in September, before the news broke. Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP Removing a CEO from the company he built is hard enough. What do you do when his name is carved into an edifice or cast in bronze for thousands of people to see or spray-paint? Jensen and Lori Huang had a pattern of giving to their alma maters or the kinds of schools where Nvidia might later recruit employees, and their giving ramped up alongside their wealth. This summer, news broke that Vanderbilt University was working full speed to open a San Francisco campus next year — to be called the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design — thanks to a $75 million gift that allowed it to take over the campus of the struggling California College of Art and Design. Construction crews at Oregon State University are closing in on an end-of-the-year deadline to open the $100 million Jen-Hsun and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex. To make things more awkward, that project was pitched as a celebration of their love story; the couple met at Oregon State when they were lab partners. A rendering for the Jen-Hsun and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Photo: Andersen Construction The $213 million building was slated to wrap construction in winter 2026. Photo: Andersen Construction Today, those schools didn’t respond to a call for comment about whether they’re changing their plans or donation contracts. Neither project is completed, making it feasible that each college could change the respective names before ribbon cutting. But altering other projects would require some digging into the masonry. A separate, smaller gift to Oregon State University in 2009 put the couple’s names in the busy, light-filled atrium of the main engineering building. At Stanford, the Huang Engineering Center has Jensen’s name over the main entrance, and he appears upstairs in a display of “tributes to some of the most important people and places in the history of the School of Engineering.” Finally, at the tiny Kentucky school Huang was sent to as a 9-year-old boarder, the couple’s names hang over the doors of a dormitory for 128 girls, for which they cut the ribbon together. The Jen-Hsun Huang Center at Stanford has his name over the main doorway (lower right). Photo: Office 52 Architecture The Stanford building includes a space named for Nvidia as well. Photo: Tim Griffith/BOORA Other institutions have redesignated buildings that honored problematic people: The emphatically pro-slavery senator and vice-president John C. Calhoun no longer has a Yale college named for him, and Bill Cosby’s name came down at Central State University in Ohio. Then there’s Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family, accused of contributing to the deaths of more than 800,000 Americans from opioids. Activists have campaigned for their name to be scrubbed off buildings, and the Louvre set an example in 2019. Their name is gone from the Met now, too. But there are still holdouts: Harvard president Lawrence Bacow told students he faced “legal and contractual considerations” to keep the name, also noting that the buildings had been named for Arthur Sackler, the patriarch who died before Purdue’s OxyContin was developed. That said, Huang’s indiscretions are hardly as substantial as theirs. There’s something especially awkward about the buildings named for both Huangs, which calls to mind the drama after Bill and Melinda Gates divorced in 2021. Their names appeared on the masonry panels outside their foundation headquarters, a symbol of their union used to illustrate stories on their divorce drama. The charity eventually rebranded as the Gates Foundation, and the panels were swapped to display the new name in a darker, more somber typeface. A University of Washington building named for the Gateses didn’t change its signs, but maybe it should have: The place is more often referred to as the Gates Center anyway. Changing any of these names may run afoul of a contract signed with the Huangs, as Vanderbilt learned when it tried to remove the word Confederate from a building on campus. (The terms of the Huangs’ gifts are, as you’d expect, private.) An appeals court ruled that the university could do so only if returned the 1933 gift, adjusted for inflation. It cost the university $1.2 million to erase a word far more offensive on a far deeper level than the Huangs’ names. What Happens to All the Jensen Huang Buildings Now? Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.