Nvidia Invests in Cloverleaf Infrastructure to Secure AI Data Center Pipeline

Nvidia partners with data center developer Cloverleaf

Nvidia is doing everything it can to keep fueling the AI buildout that has underpinned its own good fortunes. On Friday, it announced a partnership with Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a company that lays the groundwork for data centers. Cloverleaf was founded in 2024 and raised $300 million that year. It acts as a kind of middleman between utility companies and data centers, providing power sources and other kinds of pivotal infrastructure for site development. While the companies didn't disclose terms, the Wall Street Journal reports that Nivida's investment in Cloverleaf will likely add up to several hundred million dollars. Reuters reports that the chipmaker now owns a minority stake in the company. TechCrunch reached out to Nvidia for more information. The deal is part of Nvidia's ongoing push to use its immense profits toward keeping the AI flywheel spinning. Nvidia is increasingly playing a more direct role in financing and developing the AI data centers that turn around and buy its AI systems. Earlier this week, the company also announced that it would invest $1.5 billion into SB Energy, an OpenAI-linked data center project based in Ohio.

Cloverleaf deal is latest example of Nvidia using its war chest to patch cracks in the AI bubble

Nvidia has made its fortune on the AI boom, but the company has a problem. It faces a growing number of roadblocks which, if left unchecked, could pop the bubble. Thus, the AI arms dealer has been forced to play a game of Whac-a-Mole, shoring up the foundations of its empire by investing its spoils into ensuring its customers don't stop buying. The latest example of this came Friday, when Nvidia announced it'd become a minority investor in Cloverleaf. Founded in 2024, Cloverleaf specializes in laying the literal foundations - by which we mean the land and power - necessary to build bit barns so they can be leased by the cloud providers and model devs that actually pay the bills for Nvidia's hardware. Nvidia can only sell as many GPUs as there are datacenters to put them, and those datacenters can only be deployed where there's adequate power to support them. And since its latest round of GPUs can't just be dropped into any old bit barn, Nvidia is going to need a lot more datacenter capacity, and by extension a lot more power. A new breed of datacenter Up until 2024, the majority of Nvidia's systems were air-cooled. Supercomputers, like those built by Cray and Eviden, were the exception to the rule. Unless you were deploying tens of thousands of GPUs, its accelerators could be deployed just about anywhere with minimal modification to the facility. That began to change with Nvidia's Blackwell generation. You could still get air-cooled systems from Nvidia and its partners, and it certainly sold a lot of eight-way HGX B200 boxes, but deploying its most powerful NVL72 systems required liquid cooling that not every facility was capable of supplying. Liquid-cooled facilities are harder to build than their air-cooled counterparts. Liquid-cooled racks tend to be more compute dense, and therefore heavier and power hungry to operate. That means in addition to larger UPS backups and beefier PDUs, these facilities now need a bunch of coolant distribution units (CDUs) to pump coolant around -- about one for every one to three megawatts of compute capacity. Datacenters must be designed to support all this extra weight, and the problem is only going to get thornier as Nvidia transitions from roughly 250kW to 600kW racks starting next year. With Nvidia's Rubin generation of GPUs, air-cooled GPUs may as well be a thing of the past, at least in the HGX and NVL-style form factors that power the majority of AI training and inference deployments today. For the first time, Nvidia is offering the chips only in liquid-cooled varieties. So, to sell its next-generation GPUs, Nvidia not only needs its customers to have adequate capacity, but also needs those facilities to offer the right mix of power and cooling. Right sizing for deployment It's well established that Nvidia prioritizes customers with datacenters ready to fill. However, many of the GPU-slinger's biggest customers don't actually own datacenters, but instead lease capacity from others. For example, Crusoe built OpenAI's Stargate facility in Abilene, Texas, and Oracle runs it. Altman and crew are simply supplying the demand. So, Nvidia has invested in model devs and neocloud partners by helping them get financing or even investing directly in their businesses. Nvidia's investments in OpenAI, CoreWeave, and Nebius are just a few examples. That works so long as the bit barns available for rent are the right size and shape for the hardware. But, as we noted earlier, many existing facilities aren't. To further reduce friction and make it easier for its customers to find space to deploy its kit, Nvidia introduced its DSX platform last fall and officially launched it this spring. In a nutshell, DSX is a set of blueprints outlining exactly how much power, cooling infrastructure, and space are needed to support a given amount of compute. It also provides tools to optimize that compute to minimize wasted capacity. The power problem But even designing to a spec won't do bit barn builders any good if they can't get their hands on enough power. The proliferation of AI datacenters has begun to strain grid capacity, forcing many new ones to employ behind-the-meter power generation. For example, Nebius has begun using Bloom Energy's natural gas fuel cells to power its datacenters, rather than relying entirely on existing grid infrastructure. Nvidia's investment in Cloverleaf is the latest example of how the GPU slinger is using the circular AI economy to its advantage. The terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but the benefits are obvious: Cloverleaf gets an influx of cash, while Nvidia gets greater control over the build process. As part of the deal, Cloverleaf is also embracing Nvidia's DSX spec. In theory, this should enable bit barn builders to drop a DSX-compliant datacenter on a Cloverleaf-supplied site and be serving customers without delay. For Cloverleaf, Nvidia's spec includes a wealth of power-related capabilities, including DSX Flex, which allows datacenters to scale back their workloads in response to grid conditions. So if grid demand spikes during a heat wave because everyone's AC just kicked on, datacenters know it's probably not a good idea to kick off another training run. The tech can also be used to offload demand onto onsite power generation or storage systems, like batteries -- all things a company tasked with supplying powered sites for datacenters might be interested in. The deal is the latest example of how Nvidia is using its war chest to shore up cracks in the broader AI ecosystem before they become a problem. We wrote a few weeks ago about how the company was helping AI infrastructure startups secure financing in exchange for a share of the revenues, but it's now clear Nvidia is attacking potential roadblocks from every angle. ®

Nvidia invests in data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure

Aug 21 (Reuters) - Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab has made a minority investment in privately held Cloverleaf Infrastructure to develop infrastructure to power AI data center projects across the U.S., the companies said on Friday. The investment will help Cloverleaf develop sites for the data centers, while Nvidia will support ⁠infrastructure buildouts for AI computing. Reporting by Rashika Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

NVIDIA tech links power, cooling and computing for new data centers

NVIDIA is investing in Cloverleaf Infrastructure as the two companies work to speed up development of large computing facilities across the United States. The partnership focuses on one of the biggest challenges facing new data centers: securing suitable sites with enough power and infrastructure to support massive computing workloads. Cloverleaf, a real estate developer founded in 2024, has built a pipeline of projects across North America and delivered multiple gigawatt-scale developments. NVIDIA's minority investment is intended to help the company expand that work and support customers and utility partners facing rising demand for accelerated computing. The partnership goes beyond finding land for new facilities. Cloverleaf plans to use NVIDIA's DSX platform to evaluate site, power, cooling, computing and facility requirements together earlier in the design process. That approach could help developers identify infrastructure constraints before construction begins. For facilities that may require huge amounts of electricity and cooling, coordinating those requirements from the start can reduce costly changes later. NVIDIA says the need for powered, shovel-ready sites is becoming critical as computing demand increases. A site may have enough physical space for a facility but still lack the grid capacity, cooling resources or other infrastructure needed to operate it. "AI factories are the infrastructure of the intelligence age, and land, power and shell are their foundation," said Nico Caprez, vice president of global AI infrastructure growth at NVIDIA. "Cloverleaf brings deep expertise in power and site development to create exceptional, long-lived sites for generations of accelerated computing." Cloverleaf will work with customers and utilities to develop sites that can support large computing facilities. The company says its projects are designed to provide clean-powered infrastructure while considering local energy systems, natural resources and surrounding communities. NVIDIA's DSX platform is intended to bring different parts of facility planning into a common design process. That includes computing hardware, electrical infrastructure, cooling systems and the physical facility itself. For developers, the benefit is the ability to compare infrastructure tradeoffs before committing to construction. A decision about computing capacity, for example, can affect electricity demand and cooling requirements, while those requirements can influence the location and design of a facility. Once a facility is operational, NVIDIA says its DSX infrastructure and software can help customers optimise energy use and computing capacity. The companies say the goal is to make better use of every available megawatt while producing more useful computing output. The partnership also gives Cloverleaf customers access to NVIDIA's wider technology stack, including accelerated computing, high-performance networking, infrastructure and platform software. "AI is accelerating demand for digital infrastructure at an unprecedented scale and driving strong economic development opportunities for American communities," said David Berry, co-founder and CEO of Cloverleaf. "This partnership strengthens Cloverleaf's ability to identify and develop high-quality sites that provide the compute power for our country's growth and security." The deal reflects a broader shift in data-center development. As computing systems become more power-intensive, choosing a site is no longer simply a real-estate decision. Grid access, cooling, computing capacity and facility design increasingly have to be planned as one system. Cloverleaf says it has advanced multiple gigawatt-scale projects across North America since its founding. With NVIDIA now providing both investment and infrastructure technology, the companies aim to accelerate the development of sites capable of supporting the next wave of large-scale computing.

Nvidia invests in data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure

The investment ⁠will ⁠help Cloverleaf develop sites for the data centers, while Nvidia will support infrastructure buildouts for AI computing. Nvidia has made a minority investment in privately held Cloverleaf Infrastructure to develop infrastructure to power AI data center projects across the U.S., the companies said on Friday. The investment ⁠will ⁠help Cloverleaf develop sites for the data centers, while Nvidia will support infrastructure buildouts for AI computing. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed. The Wall Street Journal reported ⁠earlier in the day that Nvidia was expected to invest several hundred ⁠million dollars in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, citing people familiar with the deal. Cloverleaf works with utilities, energy providers and investors to secure power and other infrastructure for data center sites. The company said it has delivered multiple gigawatt-scale projects across North America since its founding in 2024. Cloverleaf will deploy ⁠Nvidia's DSX platform to optimize decisions on site selection, power, cooling and computing infrastructure. The deal comes days after Nvidia said it will invest $1.5 billion in SoftBank-owned data center developer SB Energy.

Nvidia invests in data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure

Nvidia has made a minority investment in privately held Cloverleaf Infrastructure to develop infrastructure to power AI data center projects across the U.S., the companies said on Friday. The investment will help Cloverleaf develop sites for the data centers, while Nvidia will support infrastructure buildouts for AI computing. * Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed. * The Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the day that Nvidia was expected to invest several hundred million dollars in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, citing people familiar with the deal. * Cloverleaf works with utilities, energy providers and investors to secure power and other infrastructure for data center sites. * The company said it has delivered multiple gigawatt-scale projects across North America since its founding in 2024. * Cloverleaf will deploy Nvidia's DSX platform to optimize decisions on site selection, power, cooling and computing infrastructure. * The deal comes days after Nvidia said it will invest US$1.5 billion in SoftBank-owned data center developer SB Energy.