A sprawling data center planned in Port Washington, proposed by a Houston-based, private equity-backed company taking an innovative approach to data center development, is the company's first publicly discussed project.
Last week,
early plans were unveiled for a data center that could span more than 1,000 acres, cost upwards of a billion dollars and use a gigawatt of electricity.
Discussions on the project continued this week with the Town of Port Washington meeting regarding the project on Thursday and the City of Port Washington scheduled to do so next week, according to meeting agendas.
The proposal comes from Cloverleaf Infrastructure, whose strategy includes buying land for data center companies and working with utility companies to upgrade power infrastructure needed for such facilities. The company "follows the power," as Cloverleaf chief development officer Aaron Bilyeu told the City of Port Washington Common Council last week.
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Aaron Bilyeu[/caption]
"We really create sustainable, scalable sites that support the largest electrical load customers out there," Bilyeu said. "...but rather than saying, 'Hey, here's a really good data center site, but how do we get power there?' The power is the real driver for us."
Cloverleaf’s business model entails acquiring land, securing municipal approvals, getting sites shovel-ready and working with local utility companies on the power needs for such projects.
Cloverleaf, founded in early 2024, then intends to sell the property to a data center user.
The proposal in Port Washington is an early case of this business model. The Port Washington project is the first project the company has gone public with, according to BizTimes research and data center trade publication Datacenter Dynamics.
Cloverleaf did not respond to requests for an interview.
The company has not disclosed a potential buyer for the Port Washington site, but said that users such as Microsoft, Meta or Amazon are possibilities, though a Microsoft spokesperson said the company is not currently considering the Port Washington site. Bilyeu said they will not be selling the site to a China-based company.
Many of Cloverleaf's executives have experience working in either the renewable energy industry or the data center industry, with several of its executives working at Microsoft and Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram).
"We've come from that industry, and we have the connections in that industry to be able to make projects like this successful," Bilyeu said.
One of the company's vice president's,
Nur Bernhardt, helped negotiate the energy agreements for Microsoft's data center project in Mount Pleasant, according to Bilyeu.
In July 2024, Cloverleaf announced raising $300 million in private equity from NGP Sustainable Infrastructure, which primarily invests in energy, oil and natural resource startups, and Sandbrook Capital, which primarily invests in renewable energy startups.
Cloverleaf’s plans come after Microsoft committed last year to
investing $3.3 billion into a data center project in Mount Pleasant and a 230-acre data center
is being planned in Kenosha for an unnamed user.
“
The rapidly increasing demand for data centers across the country represents a substantial opportunity for municipalities that have the right site, the right resources and forward-thinking leaders who understand how a data center can benefit residents and their economy,” Bilyeu said. “Port Washington has all of those attributes in place, giving it a distinct advantage that will be attractive to the kinds of companies that make major investments to build and operate data centers.”
Details of Port Washington data center
Cloverleaf is trying to assemble a site located generally east of the Interurban Trail, west of I-43 and south of Dixie Road in the Town of Port Washington, which would be annexed into the City of Port Washington.
The data center concept comes after much of the same land was
under consideration for a semiconductor manufacturing plant last spring. Those plans were dropped last year, and
M7,
WEDC,
WE Energies and the City of Port Washington brought the site to Cloverleaf for consideration, according to city officials.
The company has declined to share a specific acreage for the project, but said it has “quite a bit of land under contract,” and City of Port Washington officials said the site could include more than 1,000 acres.
The exact size of the data center — including job numbers, investment amount and energy consumption — would be dependent on the end user, Bilyeu said. Typically, a data center building for a large user can cost up to $1 billion and create between 50 and 80 permanent jobs, Bilyeu said.
Cloverleaf has reached an agreement with We Energies to bring additional “energy assets” to the area, agreeing to pay for this power generation so other ratepayers won’t have to. Further, Bilyeu said that modern data centers do not require the large amounts of water that they once did, so significant accommodations will not need to be made for the project, though the company has been in discussions with the Department of Natural Resources about how the project’s use of Lake Michigan water would impact the environment.
