dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

>>24125477

When Trump announced a $300 million ballroom at the White House, something went off in my brain. The pattern recognition part started tingling. Ninety thousand square feet, $300 million, underground construction at a secure government facility. I had heard about something like this before. Something with those exact specifications, that scale, that price point.

It took me a minute to place it, but then I remembered: Oracle’s underground data centers in Jerusalem. Built in 2021 for Israeli military intelligence. Nine stories into bedrock, designed to survive missile strikes, built to house AI systems that make life-and-death decisions in real time. Ninety thousand square feet. $319 million. Nearly identical specs to what Trump just announced.

That’s the moment I started digging.

Digging In… Jerusalem?

I’d first learned about those Jerusalem bunkers months earlier while researching Larry Ellison’s relationship with Israel and Oracle’s involvement in the war in Gaza. The facilities weren’t typical corporate server farms. They were built for what’s called data sovereignty - a physical location where Israel’s most sensitive military and intelligence data could exist under complete government control, protected from both digital and physical attacks. When you’re running classified military operations and operating AI systems in active conflict, you can’t have that infrastructure vulnerable to destruction. So they built it nine stories down into solid bedrock, 160 feet below the surface, completely invisible to satellites. You know, normal light reading.

I’d filed that information away at the time, not sure what to make of it. But when Trump’s ballroom announcement came through with those matching specifications, I knew I needed to look deeper. Because when you see that kind of pattern match, you have to ask: is this actually about a ballroom?

So I started with the most basic question: who’s building this thing?

The Contractor

The lead contractor is Clark Construction. I went to their website to see what they normally build, and their “Critical Facilities” portfolio immediately caught my attention: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Campus, CISA Cybersecurity Headquarters, USCENTCOM Headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. These aren’t ordinary buildings. These are top-secret intelligence campuses and military command centers.

But what’s listed publicly is only part of the story. I started digging through government contract databases, and that’s when I found them. Six separate contracts for data centers where even the client names are redacted. Just listed as “Confidential Client Data Center 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.” The facilities themselves are so classified that acknowledging who they’re built for would compromise national security.

So building classified data centers for clients they legally cannot name is actually Clark Construction’s specialty. And they have the contractual mechanisms to hide what they’re building - they hold a NAVFAC contract with a $950 million ceiling where the total value is public but individual task orders can be classified. Which means you can effectively hide the true cost and scope of specific projects by funneling them through pre-existing military construction contracts.

The Firing

Then on December 4th, something happened that made the picture even clearer. Trump fired his original architect. James McCrery, who designs beautiful churches and the Supreme Court gift shop (say what you want about the guy, but he’s got range), was replaced with someone named Shalom Baranes. When I looked into who Baranes is, I understood immediately what had changed.

McCrery Architects, New Carmel, Wyoming

After September 11th, when the Pentagon needed to be rebuilt and hardened against future attacks, they hired Shalom Baranes. This man designed the Pentagon’s post-9/11 hardening project - the secure wedges, the SCIFs, the bomb-resistant architecture. His entire portfolio is federal facilities requiring classified spaces and hardened infrastructure. And Trump hired him after demolition had already started, after the East Wing was already gone. The aesthetics had stopped mattering. You don’t replace your church architect with the Pentagon’s bunker guy because you want prettier chandeliers.

At this point I wanted to see what was actually happening on the ground. If this were really a data center, there would be physical evidence. And data centers need one thing above all else: massive amounts of power.

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DC’s Power-grid

So I started looking at what’s been happening with DC’s power infrastructure, and that’s where the timeline becomes impossible to ignore. In August and September 2025, just weeks after Trump announced the ballroom in July, Pepco filed emergency requests for major infrastructure work near the East Wing. They’re not making incremental improvements. They’re replacing 45-year-old power feeders and increasing power capacity in this area by five times. Five hundred percent.

Here’s what makes that absurd: downtown DC office occupancy has been declining since COVID. Buildings sit half-empty. Commercial real estate demand has shrunk. Power demand in this area should be flat or declining. But Trump announces a ballroom in July, and by August, emergency filings go in to increase power capacity by 500 percent. Downtown DC is half-empty, but apparently we need five times the power for a dance floor.

During this same period, DC Water increased capital spending by $300 million with specific focus on the Federal Triangle area. The Washington Aqueduct - run by the Army Corps of Engineers - issued warnings that “data centers are planning to use Potomac River water for cooling.” They’re explicitly acknowledging that data center development is driving new infrastructure demands. The GSA Central Heating and Cooling Plant completed upgrades including industrial-scale cooling towers and magnetic bearing chillers designed for cooling infrastructure that generates tremendous heat.

All of this infrastructure work, happening in the immediate aftermath of the ballroom announcement, in the specific geographical area surrounding it.

The Donor List

Then I started looking at who’s actually paying for this thing. The project is being privately funded, which means no congressional appropriations, no budget hearings, no public scrutiny. We have a partial donor list, though most dollar amounts remain undisclosed. And when I started going through that list, I realized I was looking at it wrong. I shouldn’t be looking for dollar amounts. I should be looking at what these companies actually do.

My anatomy of a ‘ballroom’ diagram to show the flow of operations (if my thesis is correct)

Carrier Corporation is donating HVAC systems. But Carrier has a division called Carrier Quantum Leap - their data center solutions offering “comprehensive energy efficient solutions for data center thermal management.” Are they donating a basic ballroom AC system, or their specialized data center cooling infrastructure?

Paolo Tiramani from Boxabl is on the list; which I find to be curious. Boxabl makes foldable prefab buildings, marketed for disaster relief. But they’ve also sent over 150 units to Guantanamo Bay, they work on Class 5 military installations, and their units come pre-installed with Faraday caging - electromagnetic shielding needed for SCIFs. And Oracle’s own documentation for their Jerusalem facilities describes using modular construction techniques for rapid deployment underground.

Then there’s Caterpillar, which makes industrial generators providing over 100 megawatts of backup power. Union Pacific, which owns 14,000 miles of classified fiber optic cables serving as the Department of Defense’s secure telecommunications backbone. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Palantir. Booz Allen Hamilton, which builds classified networks for intelligence agencies. Blackstone, installing over 200 megawatts of backup power infrastructure.

And you know what’s not on this list? Baccarat crystal, Versace, Hermès, Tiffany, or Steinway. The luxury brands that would murder their competitors to be associated with White House state dinners. None of them are here.

What we have instead: classified telecommunications networks, data center cooling systems, electromagnetically shielded rooms, and 100-megawatt generators. Classic ballroom essentials.

Don’t Worry, The Military Is On It

In October 2025, Trump said something that should have made every journalist in America ask harder questions: “We’re also working with the military on it because they want to make sure everything is perfect. And the military is very much involved in this.”

The military is very much involved in this ballroom. Which makes perfect sense if you think about it, because if there’s one thing the Pentagon is known for, it’s their expertise in party planning and floral arrangements. Or maybe the military doesn’t typically get involved in ballroom design. Maybe they get involved when you’re building classified facilities and survivable operations infrastructure.

Here’s what I think is actually happening.

Six months before this construction began, on Trump’s first full day back in office, Larry Ellison stood next to Trump and Sam Altman at the White House to announce Project Stargate - a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative for government operations, defense, intelligence, and consolidating federal data across agencies. That infrastructure needs somewhere to physically exist.