Read the full story by Grace Stanley in the Cornell Chronicle.
A five-year, $10.5 million gift from philanthropist Tom Secunda, co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., will help fund artificial intelligence-related research at Cornell Tech in New York City and at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science in Ithaca.
Secunda’s gift will support Cornell researchers affiliated with the Empire AI Consortium, a technology partnership launched in 2024 by Gov. Kathy Hochul with support from New York state and research institutions. The initiative, which aims to promote AI innovations focused on the public good in New York, has established a centralized AI computing infrastructure housed at the University at Buffalo, in collaboration with other universities in the state.
“I’m proud to be supporting Cornell’s top AI researchers in their pursuit of new, groundbreaking AI developments that will benefit the people of New York. By giving these researchers the freedom to explore all the opportunities that this nascent technology has to offer, we are opening up a new world of technological development,” said Secunda, who is also a member of the steering committee for the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.
“I’m also honored to be contributing to the advancement of Empire AI,” Secunda said, “which is shaping up to be one of the most impactful public-private technology partnerships in recent memory.”
