Ken Griffin, founder of the hedge fund Citadel, has sealed what is believed to be the largest land deal in Miami history to bring Carnegie Mellon University to Wynwood.

The billionaire paid Moishe Mana $1.1B for the roughly 35-acre Mana Wynwood convention center and pledged to donate another $2B to build a satellite campus for the Pittsburgh-based university on the site within the next two years, Griffin, the school and Mana announced Tuesday.

"CMU Miami represents a generational opportunity to build a new center of research and intellectual life — one that will attract exceptional students, scholars, and researchers from across the globe and rank among the world’s most important academic institutions," Griffin said in a statement.

Griffin pledged a total of $3B to Carnegie Mellon, the largest-ever donation in American higher education.

While most of the donation is dedicated to Carnegie Mellon University Miami, the remaining $1B will support the university's Pittsburgh campus. Half of that will go to the School of Computer Science, which is being renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.

CMU Miami will focus on human health and biological discovery, national security, energy and climate resilience, and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.

The campus, planned to break ground next year and start enrolling students in 2028, is expected to eventually house 3,500 undergraduate, master's and Ph.D. students, plus more than 900 faculty and staff members.

Carnegie is the second prestigious institution to choose South Florida as a landing spot for a satellite campus, following Vanderbilt University, which is raising money to build a campus in West Palm Beach.

Billionaire Stephen Ross donated $50M toward the Vanderbilt campus, and Ross and Griffin jointly committed $10M to lure companies to the region.

The deal comes to fruition after roughly three years of negotiations that were shrouded in secrecy. Despite circulating rumors of a more than $700M deal and plans for a "college-style" campus, both Mana and Griffin denied any involvement, The Real Deal reported.

Mana, among the largest landowners in Miami, started investing in the neighborhood in 2009, going on to create Mana Wynwood at 318 NW 23rd St. — roughly four blocks south of the outdoor art gallery, the Wynwood Walls.

Today, it is a venue that hosts concerts, art fairs, productions, conventions and major events like Miami Music Week and the III Points festival.

Mana will continue overseeing operations at the venue for at least the next year, The Real Deal reported.

Following Griffin's purchase, Mana will still own roughly 15 acres in the Wynwood neighborhood.

“This sale isn’t the end of our vision for Wynwood," Mana said in a statement. "It’s a passing of the torch and an opportunity for someone else to build on what we started and take it even further. We created an ecosystem around art, culture and community, and now Ken has the opportunity to add another layer by bringing Carnegie Mellon."

Griffin has become one of the most active characters in South Florida real estate since deciding to move his hedge fund's headquarters to Miami roughly four years ago.

The hedge fund founder spent more than $700M taking over an entire city block in Brickell, including buying out all of the units in a condo building and agreeing to move a historically protected cottage. The block is the site of Citadel's $2.5B headquarters project and includes additional plans for apartments and possibly a hotel.

The project, which was supposed to begin vertical construction by the end of this year, is halted by a stop-work order following a drilling rig collapse on the site that injured four people this month.

Griffin, the 33rd-richest person in the world, according to Forbes, entered Wynwood's market at the start of the year, partnering up with Wynwood-based Goldman Properties to purchase the 10-story 545wyn office for $180M. He sold a 49K SF retail and office building in Palm Beach to Blackstone for $86M in August after three years of ownership.