The university was founded in 1742 as Academia Fridericiana in Bayreuth by Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, and moved to Erlangen in 1743.

Christian Frederick Charles Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (one of the two namesakes of the institution) provided significant support to the early university.

In 1961, the business college in Nuremberg was merged with the university in Erlangen, therefore, the combined institution currently has a physical presence in the two cities.

In addition, the FAU currently has a large number of larger and smaller properties spread over the entire Erlangen city area.

As an academic universal library, it offers its users a wide range of specialist literature from all faculties and a variety of services.

The Department of Education ("Campus Regensburger Straße") is in the southeast of the city near the Dutzendteich and the former Nazi party rally grounds of Nuremberg.

In November 2009, its campus project received approval from the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

The FAU Busan Branch Campus offers a Graduate School with a master's degree program in Chemical and Bioengineering and a research center.

[9] In 2014, the university announced its intention of working toward making the Busan-Jinhae Free Economic Zone an educational hub.

Since the expansive areas of building land required for this project were not available in the center of Erlangen, the foundations for a new university campus were laid in the south east of the town in 1964.

As part of this initiative, FAU was awarded the contract for the Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT), which received 1.9 million euros of annual funding for the next five years.

The Cluster of Excellence 'Engineering of Advanced Materials and Processes' (EAM) was also established at FAU as part of the initiative and has been approved in the second round.

By joining the NHR program, the FAU has expanded its computing infrastructure, enabling its researchers to conduct more advanced simulations and analyses in various fields of study.

[25][26] Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) is the first German university to establish a branch campus in Busan in the Republic of Korea.

[39] In the Reuters ranking report published in 2019, FAU has been rated as the most innovative university in Germany and as the 2nd in Europe.

In the year 2011, the second in a row, FAU communications engineer and researcher Prof. Dr.-Ing Robert Schober (born 1971) was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, entailed with €3.5 million,[46][47][48] for an algorithm developed by him which is found in many modern phones today.