Nvidia Advances AI Infrastructure Push With Cloverleaf Partnership And New Harness Research
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Nvidia announced a strategic partnership with Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a data center site-development company founded in 2024, with deal terms undisclosed but reports indicating an investment of several hundred million dollars for a minority stake. This move extends Nvidia's strategy of directing profits toward financing data centers that buy its AI systems, following its $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy, an OpenAI-linked project in Ohio. Nvidia also published research suggesting the software harness around an AI model plays a larger role than the model itself in enabling long-horizon task performance. Using a custom harness called Agentic Variation Operators with a supervising agent, researchers achieved a perfect score for Claude Opus 5 on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, versus 30 percent without the harness. An Nvidia VP said an agent should be understood as a model combined with its scaffolding, tools, and runtime, not just an interface. The findings echoed conclusions from OpenAI and Databricks, where harness design significantly affected accuracy and costs, with Databricks' CEO noting identical models could have dramatically different costs based on harness choice. Nvidia's broader goal is to demonstrate that open, controllable harnesses across infrastructure and runtime layers are essential for securely advancing the agentic ecosystem.
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