The developer that promises, retreats, and comes back.

Two rules. They do not match.

Cloverleaf tells the public the community decides. It tells its own people something else. Read both, in their own words.

“Cloverleaf will not work in communities where this type of development is unwelcome or the development does not match the existing use for the land. That is a decision we will make ten times out of ten.”Michael Evans, Development Principal, Cloverleaf Infrastructure, in a September 23, 2025 email to Michigan officials released under public records law.³

“What we typically look for is leadership that is willing to have the conversations and facilitate those conversations.”Aaron Bilyeu, Chief Development Officer, Cloverleaf Infrastructure, Wrightstown, Wisconsin, May 2026.⁴

One says the community decides. The other says what Cloverleaf requires is officials willing to facilitate. A community can be overwhelmingly opposed and the project still moves, so long as a few leaders keep the conversations going. The gap between those two sentences is the whole story.

It does not operate. So its promises bind no one.

$300M from NGP Energy Capital Management and Sandbrook Capital, plus management. Sandbrook is anchored by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.⁵ Cloverleaf has assembled and flipped Port Washington, WI to Vantage Data Centers (~$8B campus). The company has withdrawn from Greenleaf, WI (Jan 2026), Dundee Township, MI (Oct 2025), and Edwardsville, IL (Mar 2026 — after public records showed nearly a year of secret discussions). Troy, IL's mayor proposed a moratorium in Feb 2026. Monroe County, GA is active through a special-purpose vehicle named Rum Creek DevCo LLC.⁶ Every commitment Cloverleaf makes to Lowndes — on water, jobs, road money, ratepayer protection — belongs to Cloverleaf, not to the hyperscaler that would actually own and run the facility, unless it is written to survive the sale.⁷ The company has done exactly this once on the record: in Port Washington, Wisconsin, it assembled and annexed the land, then handed the package to Vantage Data Centers for an eight-billion-dollar campus.⁸ Axios reported in February 2026 that Cloverleaf itself is drawing takeover interest.⁹ The entity selling the project to Lowndes today may not be the entity that owns it tomorrow.

Talk in secret. Deny in public.

In Edwardsville, Illinois, the Illinois Answers Project obtained roughly two dozen emails through public records showing nearly a year of detailed Cloverleaf discussions with city officials about land surveys, special-use permits, and engineering, while those same officials told residents on Facebook there was “no formal proposal.”¹⁰ In Wrightstown, Wisconsin, email records place the village administrator in talks with Cloverleaf from January 2026, months before residents were told; one resident said the board had been “misleading,” and the administrator requested Cloverleaf's own zoning codes for a village “zoning code rewrite.”¹¹

In Lowndes, the facilitation runs through the Lowndes County Economic Development Commission, whose president sits on the water board that would serve the project and whose vice-president is the same Charlie King Jr. who chairs the County Commission that would vote on the abatement.¹² The full sequence is laid out in Cloverleaf's playbook.

The promises, and the arithmetic.

The pitch is a script. In Wrightstown, Cloverleaf told residents data centers bring “significantly increased property values” leading to better roads, water and wastewater systems, grid stability, and schools.¹³ Lowndes is hearing the same lines. The arithmetic is thinner: the campus is pitched at roughly fifty permanent jobs, with independent local analysis estimating about nine would go to Lowndes residents;¹⁴ the ten-million-dollar community pledge is routed through a Montgomery foundation with no Lowndes resident on its board and is largely milestone-gated.¹⁵ And the “small office building” water claim has a nearby precedent: at the Hope Hull data center, the public figure was 30,000 gallons a day while the actual contract allocated 150,000, plus 90,000 of wastewater.¹⁶

Seven known sites. Three withdrawn, one flipped, and one re-entered.

Cloverleaf's withdrawals are real, but Wisconsin shows what they are worth. When the company quit Greenleaf in January 2026, its own statement named the next room it would enter. By spring it was back, in Wrightstown, advancing a data center through a public infrastructure referendum that names no specific project.¹⁷ “Ten times out of ten” describes how Cloverleaf exits a room, not whether it returns to the building.

“After speaking to leadership at the Village of Greenleaf and the Town of Wrightstown, Cloverleaf will not be pursuing datacenters.”Aaron Bilyeu, Chief Development Officer, Cloverleaf Infrastructure · Issued after a single community meeting of approximately 100 residents organized in under a week.¹⁸

Who runs it.

We argue the platform, not personalities. But the public record of where Cloverleaf's leadership learned this work is relevant, because the patterns are the ones Lowndes is being asked to accept on faith.

• Cloverleaf's senior energy executive ran Microsoft's energy strategy from 2011 to 2023. During that period, The New York Times reported that Microsoft's Quincy, Washington data center burned electricity it did not need to avoid a roughly $210,000 fine for under-using committed power, alongside documented diesel-generator emissions.²²
• Cloverleaf's Chief Development Officer previously ran land acquisition at Meta and at Microsoft — the two hyperscalers most associated with confidentiality clauses on data-center water use. He signed both the Greenleaf withdrawal and the Dundee acknowledgment that Cloverleaf “should have done more public communication and listening.”²³²⁴
• Cloverleaf publicly states it is pursuing 10 to 15 gigawatts of peak capacity across all its sites. Lowndes is one node in a national pipeline.²⁵

These are not personal-character claims. They are the documented public histories of the companies whose playbook Cloverleaf's leaders carried with them.

The ask.

A withdrawal that only pauses the named project leaves every back door open: a renamed entity, a quieter round of meetings, an infrastructure vote that approves the road without naming the destination. So the Lowndes ask is not “not yet.” It is withdrawal, in writing, paired with closing the levers that let a project return — no thirty-year abatement, and no county or utility commitment to build the water and power infrastructure a hyperscale campus requires.²⁶ Cloverleaf already told one community it was finished, then came back. The only version of a win that holds is the one that closes the door behind it.