Investor and billionaire philanthropist Kenneth Hao still remembers watching doctors at the University of California, San Francisco care for his aging grandfather in the final years of his life. “I was inspired by the level of attention and care he was getting,” Hao tells Forbes, “even as a 90-year-old person.”
That experience helped shape Hao and his wife Kathy Chiao’s longtime support of UCSF and academic hospitals, as well as their decision last week to commit $100 million to UCSF to support capital needs and accelerate innovation. The gift is in addition to $75 million they committed in April to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. But Hao is also candid about what philanthropy can’t fix.
As academic medical research faces ongoing funding pressure and healthcare costs continue to balloon, he says major donations can help universities move faster on infrastructure, AI and new partnerships—but won’t solve education’s deeper financial problems. “It’s supplemental, not fundamental,” he says.
That view is shared by Amir Pasic, the Eugene R. Tempel, dean of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. “You cannot expect philanthropists to replace government funding,” he says, pointing to the sheer scale of resources required to sustain academic institutions. Large gifts, he adds, are rarely predictable or recurring. “You can’t expect philanthropy to be more than supplemental, but if the gifts are awarded with flexibility, they can be innovative.”
Pasic notes that universities navigating declining and unpredictable public funding under the Trump Administration need to diversify their income streams as they invest in emerging areas like artificial intelligence. “Anecdotally, I’ve seen [philanthropists] stepping up and being innovative and tying AI to different disciplines and retaining the strength of the humanities,” he says. “It’s not that everybody’s rushing to give unrestricted gifts, but they are looking for opportunities to think outside the box.”
For Hao, chair of Silicon Valley-based private equity firm Silver Lake, that means directing philanthropic dollars toward areas universities often struggle to move quickly on: modern hospital infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools that could reshape care delivery and collaborations between institutions.
A significant portion of Hao and Chiao’s donation, which will be spread out over a time frame he declined to specify, will support capital projects, including helping fund UCSF’s sweeping expansion of its Parnassus Heights campus and the new UCSF Health Helen Diller Hospital, scheduled to open in 2030.
For Hao, this is one area where philanthropy can move quickly and make a tangible impact. “There are never enough beds, never enough doctors, and there’s never enough capacity,” he says of U.S. healthcare systems.
Part of the gift—$40 million—will go toward advancing innovation initiatives and other university priorities, while $10 million is earmarked for the Weill Cancer Hub West, a collaboration between UCSF and Stanford University to accelerate the development of new cancer treatments.
Rather than directing the donation toward a single area of personal interest, Hao, who is vice chair of the UCSF Board of Directors and co-chair of the UCSF Health Executive Council, says he aimed to align the gift with institutional priorities. He wanted to “find out what their most urgent needs are,” he says. “The bigger the gift, the more flexibility I want to give them to allocate.”
That flexibility extends to the school’s use of artificial intelligence. “This may be scary to think about, but we’re still in the first inning or two [of AI],” Hao says. “In healthcare and life sciences … it has the greatest opportunity to be enhancing and enabling,” as opposed to accelerating “the negative repercussions.”
He believes AI could accelerate drug discovery, improve diagnostics and lower costs—but says universities will need to carefully measure risks as the technology moves deeper into patient care. “There has to be a systematic way of measuring the risk-reward of AI being used in delivery of healthcare,” he says.
Hao has also come around to the ambitious idea that universities need to collaborate more aggressively—even with longtime competitors.
He points to the Weill Cancer Hub West, launched in 2025 with $100 million in backing from former Citigroup CEO Sanford (Sandy) Weill and his wife Joan, as a model. The initiative brings together the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Stanford Cancer Institute, longtime Bay Area rivals in medical research and patient care. Both institutions committed to raising $50 million each in matching funds to advance cancer detection and treatment. “Good things happen when people collaborate,” Sandy Weill said in a statement at the time.
Hao was initially skeptical about the partnership. “I thought it was a shotgun marriage of convenience that Sandy Weill brought together with a big financial incentive,” he says. But Hao’s view has shifted.
“The Weill Cancer Hub is to fund higher-risk, higher-reward ideas that aren’t as compatible with other more traditional sources of investment,” Hao says. “It’s inspirational to hear what ideas have come out of this and how these incredible young researchers are working together.”
He expects more such collaborations to emerge. “There’s extraordinary innovation that’s happening between schools,” he says. “And these local collaborations of like-minded people can be really exciting.”
Hao insists philanthropy alone won’t solve academic medicine’s financial and structural challenges. But large donors like him may help determine which institutions build faster, experiment sooner and form the partnerships they need to remain competitive.
