Bentonville Institute of Technology Campus, Bentonville, Arkansas

Bentonville Institute of Technology is a private STEM university being built from scratch on the site of Walmart’s former home office, and its first phase is no small campus. Construction formally started with an Oct. 2, 2026, groundbreaking, where the school also dropped its working name, STEM University, for the new one. Steuart and Tom Walton announced the project in May 2025, and the Alice L. Walton Foundation is among the backers.

Copenhagen’s BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, picked in June 2026, is design architect. Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects of Arkansas is architect of record, and Crossland Construction, based in Columbus, Kansas, is general contractor. Nobody has disclosed a cost.

Project Scope

The site covers 64 acres at Southwest Eighth Street and South Walton Boulevard. Phase one totals roughly 444,000 square feet in three buildings: an academic building, a residence hall with about 400 beds and a makerspace of around 130,000 square feet that the school pitches as the campus innovation hub.

Walter P Moore of Houston and Henderson Engineers of Lenexa, Kansas, are the engineering consultants. EDSA, out of Fort Lauderdale, handles landscape architecture and planning. That’s a heavyweight bench for a 300-student opening class, and it signals the founders expect the master plan to grow. Axios reported longer-range ideas for offices, housing, a hotel and a second town square tied back to downtown Bentonville.

The schedule is tight but not crazy. Applications open in 2028 and the first undergraduates, about 300 of them, arrive in August 2029. A second construction phase adding another residence hall is penciled in for late 2030 or 2031. At full build the school targets 1,500 undergraduates and 500 working professionals.

Why It Matters

New private universities are rare in the U.S., and new ones with a three-year bachelor’s degree and free tuition in the early years are rarer still. The academic model leans on STEM plus business and AI, with certificate programs for working professionals. Bentonville High School students take the first courses this spring, before a single building is up.

For the region, it puts a major new use on land Walmart vacated when it moved into its new home office campus. It also lands in a corner of Arkansas already crowded with Walton-funded cultural and civic building, from Crystal Bridges to downtown streetscape work, which keeps a steady flow of institutional work in front of Northwest Arkansas contractors.

The open question is the cost. With a BIG design, a 64-acre site and three buildings totaling close to half a million square feet, the number won’t be small, and the founders haven’t said what it is.

Project Team & Details