Nvidia just bought a stake in its third land-and-power broker this month.
The company took an undisclosed minority stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure on Friday, according to The Information. Cloverleaf's business is finding land and securing electricity access for data centers - unglamorous work that has become a real bottleneck for AI buildouts. Neither Nvidia nor Cloverleaf disclosed terms. The deal landed the same morning The Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia was expected to invest, and it marks the third company of this kind Nvidia has bought into in quick succession.
Chip supply used to be the constraint on AI expansion. Now it's dirt and megawatts - permitting land and locking down power contracts can take longer than building the data center itself. By taking stakes in the companies that broker those deals, Nvidia is quietly moving upstream of its own customers, gaining leverage over the infrastructure that decides who gets to build next.
That's a lot of influence for a company that insists it's just in the business of selling GPUs.