‘Just a couple of guys’: How a little-known company could score big from a Trump trade deal

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.

“The scale of these projects are so large, and could not be done without one very special word, TARIFFS,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Priming the little-known Entra1 — a company with ties to Trump donors — for such a large payout shows how the Trump administration might avoid using taxpayer dollars for the president’s bet on nuclear power, an industry that struggles to build projects on-time and on-budget. It also renews questions about the administration’s oversight of billions of dollars in foreign funds from Japan as well as South Korea, Taiwan and other countries, which Trump’s Commerce Department is looking to funnel to select industries, including those that have struggled to attract private capital.

Energy experts say it has become more common for big nuclear companies to outsource the kind of work Entra1 is offering. But its lack of experience in this space, the dearth of information about its operations and threadbare staffing make it a risky choice, some Wall Street investors and nuclear experts warn — for both the White House and Japan.

“Nuclear projects are obviously large, multibillion-dollar, multiyear projects, extremely hard to execute … highly regulated projects,” said Vikram Bagri, an investment analyst at Citi. “So generally, we see names of the leaders, evidence of proof, what they've executed on. Generally, we see what projects they've worked on, which is missing, and that's the genesis of the questions.”

All told, more than half a dozen Nuscale investors raised questions about Entra1, probing for more information about its structure and relationship with NuScale on the company’s November earnings call.

Joe Osha, a Wall Street analyst for Guggenheim Securities, took issue with how NuScale has characterized Entra1 as a “global energy company” in recent press releases and investor calls discussing their partnership. “In reality, it really just looks like it's a couple of guys,” Osha said in an interview.

One of those “guys” is Entra1 CEO Wadie Habboush, who appeared at an October ceremony in Tokyo announcing the initial candidates being considered for the Japanese investments.

Habboush posed for photos with Trump while displaying a memorandum of understanding stating his company is eligible to receive billions of dollars for “large scale baseload power infrastructure.”

When asked whether Entra1’s connections to the Trump administration helped it become a finalist for the money, a White House official pointed out that the administration has yet to officially allocate the funds, calling the MOU signed in Japan a “first step of interest.”

“In order to receive any funding, the consultation committee [with Japan] must thoroughly review any project presented and all go through thorough vetting and due diligence,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the application process. “Once these projects get through the consultation committee, only then does the investment committee approve any projects.”

Entra1’s website boasts having more than 45 years of experience in the energy industry, which appears to be based on tallying up the years Habboush and fellow employees have worked in the energy sector.

Entra1 brings “finance, project development and deal execution management expertise to our projects, which in the case of NuScale [reactors] involves first-of-a-kind technology,” the company said in a statement to POLITICO.

It declined to disclose how many people it employs, when it was founded and why it appears to operate out of a co-working space in Houston. Answering those questions, the company said, would “involve confidential information, material non-public information, ongoing financing discussions, or matters subject to legal obligations and/or non-disclosure agreements.”

The company said it works closely with NuScale “in an integrated fashion and in close coordination while maintaining a common professional full-service office in Houston.”

Entra1 is serving as a project manager for NuScale’s nuclear reactor design in the U.S., running interference with the federal government and other parties to help secure public contracts and funding, locate potential sites for a plant and oversee construction.

In response to questions on NuScale’s earnings call about its partnership with Entra1, the company’s CFO Ramsey Hamady said, “They're a developer. It's not like they're out there building the power plants.”

Hamady also touted Entra1’s “ability to coordinate projects, to bring in partners, to get deals and the partners they bring in that can execute and have executed on power plants in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

When asked if Entra1 had ever completed a nuclear project, Entra1 said in its statement to POLITICO “that over the course of many years” it had “conducted due diligence and analysis on the various nuclear technologies that have been under research and development phases and recognized the need for a partner to support their commercialization phases. NuScale was one among several of the reactor technologies we analyzed, together with one of our financial institutional partners.”

Habboush formed Entra1 Capital on Dec. 23, 2021, according to filings with the Delaware secretary of state’s office, after working at his family’s global investment firm, The Habboush Group, since 2007. Hamady, Entra1's CFO, previously served as the group's asset manager.

Habboush’s father, R.W., ran the investment firm and has donated more than $2 million to Trump and the Republican Party since 2017, according to records with the Federal Elections Commission.

Since initially forming the Entra1 brand, which the company defines as an “American-owned and controlled development and investment platform,” Wadie Habboush has registered 10 versions of the company with the Delaware secretary of state’s office, including Entra1 Energy on Jan. 5, 2023, and Entra1 NuScale on June 25, 2024.

One of the energy company’s outside advisers, Tommy Hicks Jr., served as co-chair of the Republican National Committee between 2019 and 2023. Hicks, who lists himself as an “advisory board member” of Entra1 on LinkedIn, is a longtime friend of the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., according to The New York Times, and was an early Trump booster. Trump named him to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an honorary group of outside advisers on national security challenges, in February 2025.

Entra1 said Hicks has known Habboush “for decades” and he “is involved in the investment strategy of the company, and has not played a role in securing any deals for the company.”

Hicks and spokespeople for the Japanese Embassy and U.S. Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Skip Alvarado, the company’s chief projects officer, has worked in the oil and natural gas industry for decades, previously holding senior roles at Bechtel and Fluor, an engineering and construction firm with ties to the Habboush group and NuScale.

Robert Fardi, the company’s head of strategic affairs, has a background in strategic communication and is associated with several foreign affairs think tanks, including the Middle East Institute and the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank focused on international affairs.

Hicks, however, celebrated Entra1’s MOU with the Trump administration in a post on LinkedIn in October, writing, “We will be delivering power for America’s Future!”

Entra1’s real coup came in June 2024 when it inked a joint venture with NuScale, a nuclear energy startup founded in 2007 that has been a pioneer in small modular reactors — units that take up far less physical space and produce less electricity than traditional nuclear power plants — which lent legitimacy to a company that had little track record beyond the experience of its employees.

The agreement formed a “global strategic alliance that establishes a ‘one-stop-shop’ for the financing, investment, development, execution, and management of NuScale-powered projects and opportunities,” according to a press release at the time.

A NuScale spokesperson said in a statement that the model “allows NuScale to focus on technology advancement and reactor manufacturing while ENTRA1 handles project financing and infrastructure development activities — a structure that enables efficiency and effective deployment and reduces barriers to advanced nuclear adoption.”

“This model addresses traditional barriers to nuclear deployment — including high upfront capital requirements and complex ownership structures — by separating technology provision from project development and financing,” the spokesperson said.

That type of agreement is becoming more common for nuclear technology companies, seeking to limit exposure to bankruptcy after several companies failed to bring reactor projects into fruition over the past three decades. But Koroush Shirvan, a professor of energy studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said successful nuclear projects often depend on a fully integrated business process, rather than working piecemeal.

“You're bringing a different type of risk,” Shirvan said. “While you're kind of minimizing your own risk of bankruptcy liability, the product delivery has its own risk.”

NuScale said it partnered with Entra1 “based on their expertise in large-scale infrastructure financing and development. The partnership was formalized in 2022 following an evaluation of ENTRA1's ability to structure complex financing and develop power infrastructure projects.”

NuScale reached an agreement with Standard Power, a company that provides infrastructure for data processing, in late 2023 to provide power for data processing plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but there have been few updates on the project’s progress. An Energy Department-backed project to host NuScale’s small modular reactors at the Idaho National Lab was canceled around the same time, according to NuScale.

That hasn’t stopped Entra1 and NuScale from inking lucrative contracts with the Trump administration, which has made the audacious promise to quadruple U.S. nuclear energy capacity by 2050. In September, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a quasi-governmental utility that spans seven states, entered a non-binding agreement for Entra1 and NuScale to produce up to six gigawatts of electricity.

The announcement was light on details about the timeline, where Entra1 will locate its plants and whether it will power private homes or energy-hungry data centers for artificial intelligence, and no formal purchase power agreement has been signed, according to NuScale. But just by entering the non-binding agreement, Entra1 received a $495 million payment from NuScale, per the terms of a “partnership milestones agreement” the two companies struck in August.

That’s around five times more than what Entra1 Energy had in net assets at the end of 2024, according to a disclosure filed with the United Kingdom.

“It's somewhat unusual that a tech company, which is NuScale, in this case, is paying Entra1 such a large amount, and that too, for a non-binding agreement,” said Bagri, of Citi.

It is still uncertain whether Entra1 will be able to secure the $25 billion in Japanese investment. The company still has to present detailed plans to the Commerce Department and the funding needs to be approved by a committee made up of both U.S. and Japanese officials before Trump gives the ultimate sign-off.

According to a memorandum of understanding, the U.S. and Japan would receive a financial stake in any project they fund. But nuclear projects have a long history of losing money in the U.S.

The Supreme Court also struck down some of Trump's tariffs on Friday, raising questions about the status of the trade agreement between the U.S. and Japan, though Trump's tariffs on automobiles and auto parts makes it likely that Japan will stick with the deal.

Only two nuclear plants have come online this century, after a significant construction slowdown in the 1990s. Amid rising competition with cheap natural gas, solar and wind power, nuclear companies have faced skepticism in the commercial market, with many forced to shutter projects after going billions of dollars over budget.

“No one has ever disputed that, to the extent that you can tap into billions of dollars in public funding, you can build [a nuclear plant],” said Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S.’ nuclear energy regulator.

The public funding “may make some people very rich,” Bradford added, “but it’s nothing that you can build long-term commercial success on.”