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.