Cheddar RSS

NEW YORK (AP) — The author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott revealed $7.1 billion in donations to nonprofits in 2025 Tuesday, marking a significant increase in her annual giving from recent years.

Writing in an essay on her website, Scott said, “This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year.”

Scott acknowledged donating $2.6 billion in 2024 and $2.1 billion in 2023. The gifts this year bring her total giving since 2019 to $26.3 billion.

Scott’s donations have captured the attention of nonprofits and other charitable funders because they come with no strings attached and are often very large compared to the annual budgets of the recipient organizations. Forbes estimates Scott’s net worth at $33 billion, most of which comes from Amazon shares she received after her 2019 divorce from company founder Jeff Bezos..

With the exception of an open call for applications in 2023, it is not possible to apply for her funding nor to reach her directly, as Scott maintains no public facing office or foundation. Organizations are usually notified through an intermediary that Scott is awarding them a donation with little prelude or warning.

In advance of her announcement on her website, Yield Giving, more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities revealed they had received $783 million in donations from Scott so far this year, according to research from Marybeth Gasman, a professor at Rutgers University and expert on HBCUs.

“One of the things that I really admire about Mackenzie Scott is that she is like an equity machine,” Gasman said, especially at a time when efforts to promote equity in education have come under attack from the Trump administration. She also said Scott’s gifts to HBCUs this time are bigger than the round of donations she made in 2020.

Not all of the schools that previously had received funding from Scott received a gift this time and there were some first-time recipients as well. In total, Gasman has tracked $1.35 billion in donations from Scott to HBCUs since 2020.

In addition, UNCF, which is the largest provider of scholarships to minority students, received $70 million from Scott, and said it will invest the gift in a collective endowment it is building for participating HBCUs. Another $50 million went to Native Forward Scholars Fund, which had also received a previous gift from Scott and provides college and graduate scholarships to Native American students.

Unlike Scott’s gifts, most foundations or major donors direct grants to specific programs and require an application and updates about the impact of the nonprofit’s work. Scott does not ask grantees to report back about how they used the money.

Research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy in 2023 looked at the impact of Scott’s giving and found few of the recipients have struggled to manage the funds or have seen other funders pullback.

Kim Mazzuca, the CEO of the California-based nonprofit, 10,000 Degrees, said her organization was notified of its first gift from Scott of $42 million earlier this year.

“I was just filled with such joy. I was speechless and I kind of stumbled around with my words,” she said, and asked the person calling from Fidelity Charitable to clarify the donation amount, which is about double their annual budget.

10,000 Degrees provides scholarships, mentoring and other support to low-income students and aims to help them graduate college without taking on loans. Mazzuca said that usually nonprofits grow only gradually, but that this gift will allow them to reach more students, to test some technology tools and to start an endowment.

Mazzuca credited Scott for investing in proven solutions that already exist.

“She comes from a very deep, reflective space, very heartfelt,” Mazzuca said. “And she’s only providing these financial means as a tool for people to recognize they are who they’ve been waiting for.”

That idea references a prophecy from the Hopi Tribe that ends with the line, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Mazzuca said she’s drawn on the prophecy for years to empower both her organization and the students it supports to recognize their own power to shape our world.

In October, Scott posted an essay on her website under that title and sharing the prophecy. The essay, which she expanded upon in December to announce her giving, also reflects on how acts of generosity and kindness can ripple far afield and into the future. She cited her own experiences getting help while in college, including a dentist who repaired a tooth for free and her roommate who loaned her $1,000.

Scott now has invested in that same roommate’s company, which offers loans to students who would otherwise struggle to get financing from banks. The investments seem to be part of an effort Scott announced last year to move more of her money into “mission aligned” investments, rather than into vehicles that seek only the highest monetary returns.

In her 2025 essay, Scott seemed to urge people toward action, writing, “There are many ways to influence how we move through the world, and where we land.”

___

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and non-profits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI said Tuesday it has picked Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its first chief of revenue, a message to wary investors that the ChatGPT maker is serious about making a profit from its artificial intelligence technology.

OpenAI said Dresser will oversee global revenue strategy and “will help more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations.”

Dresser had already spent more than a decade at Salesforce when the software pioneer announced in 2020 it was buying work-chatting service Slack for $27.7 billion. She helped integrate Slack into the software company before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff picked her as CEO in 2023.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this month set off a “code red” alert in an internal email to employees to improve its flagship product, ChatGPT, and delay other product developments.

OpenAI first released ChatGPT just over three years ago, sparking global fascination and a commercial boom in generative AI technology and giving the San Francisco-based startup an early lead. But the company faces increased competition with rivals, including Google, which last month unleashed Gemini 3, the latest version of its own AI assistant.

Altman said this fall that ChatGPT now has more than 800 million weekly users. But the company, valued at $500 billion, doesn’t make a profit and has committed more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to the cloud computing providers and chipmakers it relies on to power its AI systems.

The risk that OpenAI won’t make enough money to fulfill the expectations of backers like Oracle and Nvidia has amplified investor concerns about an AI bubble.

OpenAI makes revenue from premium subscriptions to ChatGPT, but most users get the free version. OpenAI introduced its own web browser, Atlas, in October, an attempt to compete with Google’s Chrome as more internet users rely on AI to answer their questions. But OpenAI hasn’t yet tried to sell ads on ChatGPT, which is how Google makes money from its dominant search business.

Altman’s early December memo said the company was delaying work on advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Monday that he would allow Nvidia to sell an advanced type of computer chip used in the development of artificial intelligence to “approved customers” in China.

There have been concerns about allowing advanced computer chips to be sold to China as it could help the country better compete against the U.S. in building out AI capabilities, but there has also been a desire to develop the AI ecosystem with American companies such as chipmaker Nvidia.

The chip, known as the H200, is not Nvidia’s most advanced product. Those chips, called Blackwell and the upcoming Rubin, were not part of what Trump approved.

Trump said on social media that he had informed China’s leader Xi Jinping about his decision and “President Xi responded positively!”

“This policy will support American Jobs, strengthen U.S. Manufacturing, and benefit American Taxpayers,” Trump said in his post.

Nvidia said in a statement that it applauded Trump’s decision, saying the choice would support domestic manufacturing and that by allowing the Commerce Department to vet commercial customers it would “strike a thoughtful balance” on economic and national security priorities.

But a group of Democratic senators objected to the chip sales.

“Access to these chips would give China’s military transformational technology to make its weapons more lethal, carry out more effective cyberattacks against American businesses and critical infrastructure, and strengthen their economic and manufacturing sector,” said the statement.

The group included Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.

The senators noted that Chinese AI company DeepSeek recently said the lack of access to advanced American-designed chip was their biggest challenge in competing with U.S. companies involved in AI, with companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity and Palantir making major investments in developing the technology.

Trump said the Commerce Department was “finalizing the details” for other chipmakers such as AMD and Intel to sell their technologies abroad.

The approval of the licenses to sell Nvidia H200 chips reflects the increasing power and close relationship that the company’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, enjoys with the president. But there have been concerns that China will find ways to use the chips to develop its own AI products in ways that could pose national security risks for the U.S., a primary concern of the Biden administration that sought to limit exports.

Nvidia has a market cap of $4.5 trillion and Trump’s announcement appeared to drive the stock slightly higher in after hours trading.