We prove asymptotic equivalence of nonparametric additive regression and an appropriate Gaussian white noise experiment in which a multidimensional shifted Wiener process is observed, whose dimension equals the number of additive components. The shift depends on the additive components of the regression function and solely the one- and two-dimensional marginal distributions of the covariates via an explicitly specified bounded but non-compact linear operator~$Γ$. The number of additive components $d$ is allowed to increase moderately with respect to the sample size. In the special case of pairwise independent components of the covariates, the white noise model decomposes into $d$ independent univariate processes. Moreover, we study approximation in some semiparametric setting where $Γ$ splits into a multiplication operator and an asymptotically negligible Hilbert-Schmidt operator.