Apple and Nvidia each gave $25 million to the ballroom President Donald Trump is building on the site of the White House East Wing, according to internal records reviewed by The Washington Post and reported on Thursday. The records put total private pledges at $333 million.
The list contains 67 donations above $10,000, 57 of them of at least $100,000. At least $77 million came from donors who asked not to be identified — Nvidia's own $25 million was among the contributions given on condition of anonymity, and the company was named only through the records.
Who is on the list
Alongside Apple and Nvidia at $25 million are Miriam Adelson and Charlie Ergen, the EchoStar co-founder, who gave through a donor-advised fund. A foundation set up by former Marvel chairman Isaac Perlmutter and his wife, Laura, gave $20.3 million.
Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and an affiliate of Rocket Companies each gave $10 million. Comcast gave $7.5 million. Amazon, Cisco, Meta, ServiceNow, Elliott Management, Paul Singer, a donor-advised fund of Jeff Yass and the gift fund of David Baszucki and Jan Ellison each gave $5 million. The crypto industry and crypto investors account for about $18 million, more than $5 million of it from the twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.
A further $22 million reached the project through a trust set up by Trump's lawyer John P. Coale, which held the $24.5 million settlement paid by Google's YouTube; Benzinga lists that sum as a contribution from Alphabet, Google's parent company. Trump's own name does not appear anywhere on the list.
By the Post's tally, technology companies and their founders account for $166.1 million — close to half of everything raised.
A pardon and a dropped investigation
Two entries sit next to decisions the administration made.
Isabela Herrera pledged $2.5 million in September 2025, a month after the bribery charges against her father, the banker Julio Herrera Velutini, were reduced to a misdemeanour. Trump pardoned him in January. She paid $835,000 of the pledge in October.
The Federal Communications Commission dropped an investigation into Ergen's EchoStar shortly after he met Trump and FCC chairman Brendan Carr. EchoStar then won approval to sell spectrum licences to AT&T.
Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo told the Post that "as an American company, our support for the United States is paramount, and independent of any business interests." The White House, Microsoft, Google and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment from Benzinga. JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said in November 2025 that his bank would not donate, saying it was conscious of the risk of looking as though it were buying political favour.
The bill
Trump first put the ballroom at $200 million and said private donors would cover all of it, at no cost to taxpayers. The projected cost has since risen to roughly $600 million, and some of it is now being met with public money. The administration says the project is under budget and ahead of schedule, with completion set for 2028.
The East Wing was demolished in October 2025 to clear the site. What the donor list makes visible is not a rule that was broken — private money for White House building projects is not itself unlawful — but the identity of the people paying: a set of companies and investors whose regulatory and contracting business runs through the same building.
Reporting from Forbes, Benzinga, Democracy Now! and Just Security, all citing internal records reviewed by The Washington Post.
