❯ NVIDIA Backs Three Data Center Power Developers, Investing $2 Billion in Lancium Alone

INVESTMENT LISTAccording to Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, NVIDIA has invested in three data center power-and-land developers in quick succession: $2 billion in Texas-based Lancium for a 20% stake, plus an optional $1 billion investment that could push its position to 28%; a minority investment of several hundred million dollars in clean-power developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure; and a stake in SoftBank’s power subsidiary, SB Energy. The common thread across all three deals: OpenAI is the anchor tenant at every site.

THREE SITESLancium’s asset is a campus in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI rents compute capacity through Oracle. The SB Energy deal is tied to an Ohio campus for which OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease. Cloverleaf, founded in 2024, has received $300 million in backing from NGP and Sandbrook Capital, has sold more than 7 GW of powered land, and holds a pipeline of over 10 GW. Notably, OpenAI had previously explored acquiring Lancium outright.

COMPANY STATEMENTCloverleaf’s CEO put it bluntly: this is a bundling play. Power and land lock customers into NVIDIA’s hardware-software stack, blocking substitution paths such as Google’s or OpenAI’s in-house chips while conveniently avoiding chip oversupply. In other words, before a single rack is built, the chip seller has already bought the land and the power.

COMPETITIVE SHIFTThe center of competition is shifting from compute performance per watt to grid interconnection timelines. Whoever secures powered land earlier can deliver clusters earlier; even the best chip can’t make up for a three-year wait on a substation. Cloud providers’ site-selection teams now face an awkward reality: the land they want may sit with a seller backed by their own chip supplier. This directly raises the cost of securing interconnection capacity.

▪ SIGNALChip companies are now taking equity stakes in power and land; the compute supply bottleneck is no longer at the foundry.