As historically Black colleges and universities grapple with shrinking resources and mounting financial pressure, Fisk University President Agenia Walker Clark is betting the school's future on one of the most controversial developments in America: a data center.

Shocking some of its neighbors, the Nashville-based HBCU recently unveiled a $1 billion plan it calls "Quantum Leap " to revitalize its 40-acre campus. The plan’s financial anchor would be a $400 million Innovation Center, encompassing a 30,000-square-foot academic space alongside a 70,000-square-foot technology data center that Clark believes could generate revenue for the university for generations.

Demand for data centers is surging nationwide, driven by the rise of artificial intelligence and cloud computing—McKinsey & Company projects that cumulative global spending on data center infrastructure could reach $7 trillion by 2030. But local opposition has been rising too, with communities worried about the power and water demands of the centers, as well as any potential health effects.

For Clark, the project is about more than chasing a hot sector. It's about creating a sustainable path for a small university with roughly 1,000 students (mostly undergraduates, with a few dozen master’s degree candidates) and a meager endowment. As she tells it, the school’s tech focus makes the innovation center a natural fit, rather than a stretch. About 30% of graduates major in computer science, with many more minoring in data analytics.

Some HBCUs have recently landed major gifts from billionaires. Most notably, MacKenzie Scott, the author, philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has made a string of donations. But Fisk has not been among Scott’s recipients. Clark says she is glad to see other HBCUs benefit, but her school is not waiting around for a transformative gift. Instead, she’s been tapping into her background in marketing and as a not-for-profit executive (she was CEO of Girl Scouts in Middle Tennessee for 19 years) to develop a strategy that makes sense for the school over the long haul.

“As long as we stay true to who we are and what we're doing, we will always be able to appeal to philanthropists who want to invest,” Clark told Forbes. “That's why this master plan is important, so they know what their investments will go into."

Fisk’s current endowment of $30 million works out to $30,000 per student. By contrast, Bates College, a small, predominantly white liberal arts school, has an endowment of $486 million, or more than a quarter million per student.

While Fisk faces many of the same challenges as other small, private, tuition-dependent colleges, it scored a healthy B+ in Forbes' 2026 College Financial Grades, the same grade as Bates. Its unrestricted net assets-to-expenses ratio, which offers a real glimpse of the amount of money a school has each year to cover operations, is also relatively strong at more than 200%, far outpacing peer colleges, including HBCUs like Hampton, Dillard, and Xavier University of Louisiana.

Still, Fisk is not living on easy street financially; its puny endowment is way below its peer group and the national average, and its cash-and-investments-to-debt ratio sits at 2.63, far below the peer average of 7.37. In 2024, the last year for which audited financials are available, its cash position dropped 59% from 2023. These financial pressures run through Clark's pitch for the data center: a university that still looks healthy by several measures, but is now searching for ways to boost its operating income.

The proposal is the product of more than two years of planning and isn't Fisk’s first swing at a master plan. Clark says she learned during early conversations with students, faculty, staff and alumni that a campus master plan effort had actually started in 2008. “Nothing happened with it,” she says. After becoming president in 2023, Clark, now 67, spent months meeting with the campus community to map out priorities for Fisk’s future. Those conversations eventually led to the Quantum Leap master plan designed, she says, to carry the 160-year-old university through its next 160 years.

During a recent Zoom interview with Forbes, Clark didn’t seem bothered by criticism from alumni and community members who say a data center doesn’t belong on the campus of a historic liberal arts institution, whose famed graduates include W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and John Lewis. “As far as backlash, I haven't kept up with much of it because I expected it," she said. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and a lot of times those opinions are not founded in facts." As she sees it, protecting Fisk's historic mission now requires finding revenue in places the university hasn't looked before.

Among the plan’s critics: Justin Jones, a Fisk alumnus and Tennessee state representative, who joined community members at a press conference opposing the proposal. Nashville health advocate and social media influencer Ali Moresco, who has more than 33,000 followers on Instagram, said she got involved after seeing complaints from residents living near large-scale data centers elsewhere in Tennessee about possible health effects. She joined forces with the group No New Data Centers to spread awareness by attending city council meetings and posting Instagram Reels.

"I got sick 10 years ago. It took me eight years to regain my health," she told Forbes. "I'm very conscious of things that could impact my health, and unfortunately it seems like these centers absolutely can." Moresco was careful to draw a distinction: Most activists opposing the Fisk plan, she said, aren't against AI or innovation itself, but want any future development to be done with more transparency and greater regard for the surrounding community.

Clark says she herself was skeptical of the data center idea when a Fisk alumna working in Silicon Valley first suggested it, and that she originally had some of the same fears critics are raising now. But, she adds, the university has done its homework and has thought about the community. For more than two years, it studied whether a data center could be part of Fisk's future without harming students, employees or neighbors. The plan calls for a facility built with sustainability and energy efficiency in mind–one that is certified to meet LEED standards (set by the U.S. Green Building Council).

"When you hear about the dirty ones [data centers], what do you hear?" Clark asks. "They use up resources, they contaminate our water, they cause my utility rates to go up, and they leave a terrible carbon footprint. I mean, it goes on and on and on."

"Why would we want to open up an innovation center and co-locate it with an academic center, and it'd be a dirty data center?" she asks rhetorically. "Why would we do that? If you just really pause and think about it logically, that is not in the future of this university."

One reason the idea works for the Fisk campus, Clark says, is that it has undeveloped land with access to enough power to run the center. "We're not selling our land, and we're not expanding beyond our footprint," she explains. "We're just trying to maximize and optimize where we are."

The financial squeeze on HBCUs helps explain why Clark is willing to consider something this unconventional. The schools have historically been underfunded and now are dealing with some of the same pressures as other colleges. Yet HBCUs keep producing an outsized share of the nation's Black professionals. The United Negro College Fund puts the numbers at roughly 70% of Black doctors and dentists, 50% of Black engineers and public school teachers, and 35% of Black lawyers.

Fisk’s broad master plan, unveiled in May, calls for new residence halls, a student center, expanded academic facilities, an innovation hub, upgrades to existing infrastructure and a boost in enrollment to 1,500. There would also be an expanded art gallery to display more of Fisk's 4,000-plus piece collection. "Instead of you always having to go to the Met to see us, why not come to Fisk?" Clark says. Each project, she adds, will need its own financing, fundraising strategy and partnerships.

Clark insists there are some faulty assumptions out there about the plan– specifically that Fisk is selling its land to a corporation and that it is already committed to building an AI data center. Neither is true, she says. The university will continue to own the land and building the center is contingent on the university selecting and signing a satisfactory agreement with a developer.

When asked about the project's potential return on investment, she didn't pretend to have an answer: "I don't know that yet, because I don't know who my partner is." The project's $400 million price tag, she noted, is only a planning estimate based on current market rates for power and square footage—not a finalized budget.

Fisk isn't the only HBCU eyeing data centers as a source of revenue and technological relevance. Several HBCUs have partnered with companies such as Microsoft to provide students with training and a pathway to industry jobs. Atlanta-based Impact DataSource is pursuing a similar "Dream Centers" initiative, partnering with HBCUs to build facilities designed to generate workforce training and local economic development. Its first $108 million project, approved in partnership with North Carolina A&T State University, will sit off campus rather than on university grounds.

Along with specific concerns about the data center, Clark has faced questions about how Fisk and its ambitious master plan will fare in the face of a broad corporate retreat from diversity initiatives.

"I see Fisk as an institution that has educated and delivered to this community, to this country, to this world, some great minds we have offered up to businesses, corporations, governments, municipalities, individuals who are committed to excellence. This isn't about DEI to me. This is about excellence."

Fisk was chartered in 1866 to educate all, she points out, and the mandate hasn't changed. "We've done a really good job of that, and we just need to make sure we keep doing it and not look back, but look ahead and look at everything we're going to need in order to move forward."

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