Building an AI Environment from the Ground Up: A Hands-On Journey for Students and Faculty at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Calpoly)

We are thrilled to announce that the 4 Supermicro servers with 8XNvidia 1080 TI GPU donated to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Calpoly) have arrived safely—and with them, an exciting new phase begins. Thanks to this generous contribution, endorsed by a Memorandum of Understanding between Computing for Humanity and Calpoly, the university is launching an initiative that brings students and faculty together to build a complete AI environment from the ground up.

The next step? Identify the remaining hardware components needed to rack and power the GPUs. From there, students will install the operating system and configure an OpenAI environment. This hands-on process will provide students with an immersive learning experience that covers the full AI stack—from hardware to infrastructure to deployment.

This initiative is rooted in a “learn-by-doing” approach, according to Alex Harwood, Associate Vice President of Advanced Computing and Chief Technology Officer at Calpoly. “Just as we’ve supported student-run data centers and security operations centers in the past, this project gives participants real-world technical experience while directly contributing to research capacity on campus. Several faculty members—including those studying the role of AI in higher education—will be using this project as part of their academic research. Others are already exploring ideas for future research projects that will utilize the new environment”, he notes.

What makes this effort possible is Computing for Humanity’s mission: enabling access to high-performance computing at minimal or no cost. Because of this support, Calpoly is empowering students to gain hands-on expertise in AI system development while giving researchers access to cutting-edge infrastructure.

We look forward to sharing progress updates—and showcasing the results at their next AI Fair in April 2026.