Carlton Cloverleaf Data Center, Carlton, Wisconsin

Cloverleaf Infrastructure has dropped its plan to buy land for a data center in the town of Carlton, in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, after the town made clear it did not want one. The company scrapped the Carlton data center plan in late 2025, and Cloverleaf and town officials confirmed it in January 2026.

Cloverleaf, founded in February 2024, is a powered land provider: it buys land for data center companies and works with utilities to upgrade the power supply. It had been trying to turn farmland outside Carlton into a site ready to host a data center. "The town chairperson said, 'I don't support data centers. I don't think this is a good fit,'" Cloverleaf chief development officer Aaron Bilyeu said. "We shook hands and said 'thank you.'"

Carlton sits on the shore of Lake Michigan south of Kewaunee. It is an agricultural town of about 1,000 people that, its town board chair said, has more cattle than people. "I'm against big business," said town Chairman David Hardtke, who has pushed back against the idea for months. "People in the town of Carlton do not want the AI (data) center." Hardtke said data center companies and solar projects have been approaching the town to build near the nuclear site. "They're just crawling out of the woodwork right now, trying to eat up the farmland," he said. "Once they take land away, you know, it'll never come back," said Chris Kohnle, president of the Tisch Mills Farm Center. Others hoped for investment; Kewaunee County resident Dan Giannotti said an employer like that would bring new homes and businesses, "Because right now we're just stagnant."

The draw is the Kewaunee Power Station, the nuclear plant in Carlton that closed in 2013. Its owner, EnergySolutions, is seeking Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to bring nuclear power back to the site because it expects data centers and AI to raise the state's energy demand. The company told the town licensing could take three or four years and construction another eight to ten after that. Bilyeu said Cloverleaf is still looking for a data center site in northeast Wisconsin, and that it is not the only company looking.

Carlton was the second Wisconsin site Cloverleaf walked away from; it also dropped a proposal near the village of Greenleaf in Brown County in January 2026 after community outrage. Neighboring Manitowoc County has since passed a data center moratorium, and a moratorium has been proposed in Brown County.