Ex-Microsoft Exec's Cloverleaf Raises $300M to Be AI's Land Broker
Cloverleaf packages electricity deals and land for AI data centers, raising $300M to become the industry's power broker.
There's a new middleman in the AI gold rush, and it's not selling picks or shovels. It's selling dirt and electricity.
Cloverleaf, founded by former Microsoft executive Brian Janous, has raised $300M to do something deceptively simple: strike deals with utility companies and secure land for AI companies desperate to build data centers.
Think of them as modern-day land men. AI's insatiable hunger for compute means companies need massive facilities with guaranteed power access. That's harder than it sounds. Utility negotiations are slow. Land acquisition is messy. Cloverleaf bundles both into ready-made packages.
It's a bet that the bottleneck for AI scaling isn't algorithms or chips — it's physical infrastructure. Someone has to wrangle the real-world deals that keep the servers humming. Cloverleaf wants to be that someone, and $300M says investors agree.