After the Soviet army invaded Hungary in November 1956, Andras Grof barely escaped with his life. Weeks later, he was enrolled at City College as a chemical engineering student who knew very little English. The Jewish refugee, who changed his name to Andrew Grove, graduated at the top of his class three years later.

At an alumni banquet last night, City College announced that its former student, who as the co-founder of Intel Corporation is one of Silicon Valley’s greatest legends, is making a $26 million donation to City College’s School of Engineering. It’s the largest gift ever made to City College.

The gift will be used to establish an endowment to support top faculty members and students, according to a draft press release Intel provided to The New York Sun. City College officials yesterday would not comment on the donation, which will be announced to the public today. It will also pay for new laboratories, interdisciplinary programs, research projects, and wireless Internet access throughout Steinman Hall, where the school is located.

“The City College of New York represents the bookends to my professional life – from the cold January day in 1957 when I found my way to the admissions office to the chance encounter, a few weeks ago, with the winner of the Intel Science Talent Search on the day he was starting at City,” Mr. Grove said in the statement. “This institution is a veritable American-dream machine. I hope to help keep it that way.”

Rumors of the gift have been circulating for months. It arrives less than a year after CUNY announced a $1.2 billion capital campaign, an ambitious endeavor for a public university system that has successfully sought to rebuild its reputation by raising academic standards and that is increasingly relying on private giving.

CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, said the gift represents “an enormous vote of confidence for the City College and CUNY” and an “important milestone” for the eight-year capital campaign, which has raised $625 million to date.

CUNY schools taking part in the campaign have received a slew of other large donations. Baruch College received $25 million from the chairman of the New Plan real estate investment trust, William Newman, and $10 million from Lawrence Field, the founder and principal of NSB Capital Partners, a real estate development firm. Brooklyn College has received recent gifts of $10 million, $6.5 million, and $5 million.

Mr. Grove, whose net worth was estimated to be more than $300 million in 2002, was CEO of Intel between 1987 and 1998. He stepped down as chairman of the microprocessor company in May and now serves as a senior adviser. Author of “Only the Paranoid Survive” and a memoir called “Swimming Across,” Mr. Grove wrote an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association published in July that attacked the health care industry for its inefficiency. Mr. Grove was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1997.

Mr. Grove has given $5 million to the University of California at San Francisco for stem cell research. Earlier this year, his company awarded David Bauer a $100,000 scholarship for taking first place in the Intel Science Talent Search. Mr. Bauer is now enrolled at City College in the CUNY honors program.

More than a quarter of City College’s juniors and seniors who have declared their major are enrolled in the School of Engineering, the only school of its kind in the CUNY system.

The school, which is led by Acting Dean Joseph Barba, has departments in bio-medical engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical and computer science. Between 2000 and 2004, undergraduate enrollment at the school grew by 20%. In the spring of 2004, the school had an undergraduate enrollment of 2,309 and a Ph.D. enrollment of 178.