Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is a Greek American architect. He is the founder and chairman emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also founded the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). Negroponte is the author of the 1995 book Being Digital translated into more than forty languages.

Negroponte was born to Dimitrios Negropontis (Greek: Νεγροπόντης), a Greek shipping magnate, competitive alpine skier and member of the Negroponte family. He grew up in New York City's Upper East Side. He has three brothers. His elder one, John Negroponte, is the former United States Deputy Secretary of State. Michel Negroponte is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. George Negroponte is an artist and was President of the Drawing Center from 2002 to 2007.

He attended Buckley School in New York, Fay School in Massachusetts, Le Rosey in Switzerland, and The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1961. Subsequently, he studied at MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student in Architecture where his research focused on issues of computer-aided design.

Yona Friedman recalls having met Negroponte in 1964 when he was still a student at MIT, where he had discussed with Friedman his idea for an "Architecture Machine". The architecture machine is considered by Negroponte to be a machine collaborator, who engages in an ongoing architectural design process with a human peer. Both machine and human participants engage in a process of mutual training and growth with each other, in order to harness the interactive potential found in peer-to-peer collaborations during an architectural design process with man and machine instead.

He earned a master's degree in architecture from MIT in 1966. Despite his accomplished academic career, Negroponte has spoken publicly about his dyslexia and his difficulty in reading.

Negroponte later joined the faculty of MIT in 1966. For several years thereafter he divided his teaching time between MIT and several visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley. He also during 1966, had a role with IBM which could potentially provide funding for research to find means of using computers to help architects, planners and designers.

He attended Avery Johnson's lab and seminars at the MIT Sloan school. He eventually met Warren Brodey, who Negroponte described as being “one of the earliest and most important influences”. According to Evgeny Morozov, it was through Brodey that the ideas of "soft architectures" and "intelligent environments" became established in Negroponte's thinking.

In 1967, Negroponte founded MIT's Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank which studied new approaches to human–computer interaction. The Architecture Machine Group was primarily concerned in addressing the potential of computers in architecture. Negroponte argued during this period that computer aided design was only making activities such as architecture "faster", and that the underlying spirit of the architectural machine group would be to explore the various possibilities for generating collaborating machines for architectural design. The group took funding from DARPA and other parts of The Pentagon to explore early research in human-computer interaction and virtual reality.