Tech firm’s $50 million Trump library gift preceded massive federal land deal
The Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group gave $50 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library in January 2026 — two months before the Trump administration approved a federal land lease that will allow the firm to build what could become the world’s largest artificial intelligence data center.
The company confirmed the timing of its donation in a written response to Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., who released the letter Thursday.
The White House referred questions to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, which did not respond to a request for comment. SoftBank and the U.S. Energy Department also did not respond.
Although the $50 million gift was reported earlier this year, its timing around the land lease deal remained unknown. The Democratic senators said SoftBank’s donation — the library’s largest known donation — came squarely within the timeframe in which SoftBank was seeking federal approval for its Ohio project.
“Are we expected to believe it’s a coincidence that two months after SoftBank donated $50 million to the Trump library, his administration announced a massive lease deal for SoftBank’s data center?” Warren said in a statement. “Again and again, it seems like Trump is putting handshake deals with CEOs over what’s best for Americans.”
The lawmakers highlighted a sequence of events that they questioned.
In December 2025, reports surfaced that SoftBank and the administration were discussing a plan to use money from Japan’s $550 billion U.S. investment commitment to build Trump-branded industrial parks across the country. By January, SoftBank’s proposal was reported to be on the short list for selection.
That same month, SoftBank donated $50 million to the Trump library.
Then, on March 20, the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce announced the partnership with SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy to redevelop the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio — a Cold War-era uranium enrichment site — into a 10-gigawatt AI computing campus on roughly 3,700 acres of federal land. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said the campus could draw up to $500 billion in private investment.
The Democrats say the arrangement let SoftBank sidestep permitting and regulatory steps that a private land project of that size would normally face. The Energy Department has described the lease as a way to put a decommissioned national security site back to work and argued SB Energy also committed to accelerated environmental cleanup of the area.
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Lily Becker is a producer on “The Weeknight” for MS NOW.
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
