$50 million new gift from David Payne aims to accelerate university’s energy future
David Payne, the St. Louis electrical-contractor executive and avid auto racing fan who grew a family business into a more than $200 million-revenue enterprise, is placing a $50 million bet on the University of Missouri’s energy future.
His gift—the largest single investment ever made in a Mizzou school or college—will underwrite the new 116,000-square-foot Payne Energy Innovation Center, support students and faculty research, and finance a major renovation of Naka Hall.
Mizzou will also rename its electrical engineering and computer science department for Payne, a 1983 graduate of the program.
The personal story beneath the headline is one of second-generation enterprise. Payne Electric began in 1954 under Louis Payne, first in Flint, Michigan, before relocating to St. Louis four years later.
David Payne acquired the company in 1985, grew its revenue past $35 million by 2000, then bought Crest Electric to create PayneCrest.
The combined company exceeded $200 million in revenue in 2023, with work spanning complex commercial and industrial electrical systems, data centers, power projects, and renewable-energy infrastructure.
The current hook is that Mizzou broke ground this week on the center, scheduled to open in fall 2028, at a moment when campuses, utilities, and technology companies are racing to address electricity demand tied to AI, data centers, grid security, and extreme-weather resilience.
Mizzou says the center will unite engineering with science, agriculture, public policy, business, and law around advanced energy materials, AI and grid security—an unusually broad institutional response to the energy implications of the AI buildout.
For Payne, the gift also tracks closely with the business he built. PayneCrest’s portfolio has included data center, power, and renewable-energy work, while the company’s own history emphasizes its expansion from a local contractor into a national commercial and industrial player.
The philanthropy, therefore, reads less like a detached naming gift than an alumnus-operator’s effort to seed the technical workforce, research capacity, and systems thinking needed by the electrical economy that made his fortune.
The contribution pushed Mizzou’s Power the Roar campaign to $1.1 billion—more than halfway to its $2 billion target—and follows a prior $10 million energy-center gift from fellow 1983 Mizzou engineering alumnus Jim Fitterling.
But Payne’s commitment is the decisive capital infusion: it converts an emerging energy initiative into a named, purpose-built research facility and extends the Payne family’s business legacy into one of Missouri’s most consequential university projects.