A three-year-old energy company that appears to have fewer than five employees is being considered for a $25 billion contract from a massive trade deal President Donald Trump brokered with Japan last year, a prospect that’s raising red flags among some U.S. investors.
The company, Entra1 Energy, is largely unknown in the nuclear industry, never completed a nuclear project and, according to the address listed on its website, is headquartered out of a WeWork office in Houston. But in October it was on a shortlist of finalists to build new energy infrastructure using a slice of the $550 billion the Japanese government pledged to avoid Trump’s tariff regime a few months earlier.
The Trump administration tapped Entra1 in collaboration with NuScale, a publicly traded nuclear energy company worth more than $4 billion, for the “supply of large-scale baseload power infrastructure,” according to the White House. The Japanese government said those power projects could include “power generation (gas-thermal, nuclear) for AI.”
Japan’s pledge has been held up by Trump as an example of how his trade threats are securing foreign investments in strategic sectors, with the U.S. taking a financial stake in the projects — money the White House started rolling out in the past week in other areas.
