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1. Bitfarms Keel Infrastructure Bets Everything on Power
Bitfarms Keel Infrastructure, the company formerly known as Bitfarms, has abandoned Bitcoin mining to become a pure power developer for AI data centers. Chief executive Ben Gagnon, 37, controls about 2.2 gigawatts of approved or nearly approved capacity, but said on the third-quarter call that no leases will be signed in 2026, and the shares fell roughly 20%.
The company completed its rebrand as Keel Infrastructure on April 1, 2026, and moved its legal home from Canada to the United States at the same time. The new name was chosen to suggest steadiness and the long-term leases the business now hopes to sign, and Gagnon has leaned into the nautical theme on his X profile, where he presents himself as "Captain Keel."
Gagnon frames the ambition simply: turn a Bitcoin miner into an energy infrastructure business serving artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The idea rests on one observation that has reshaped the mining industry over the past two years. The most valuable thing a miner owns is not its machines but its access to electricity.
2. The Late-2023 Decision to Leave Bitcoin Mining
Gagnon reached his conclusion in late 2023, when he was 34 and serving as Bitfarms' chief mining officer. In his view, the company's worth sat in its power supply rather than in the racks of specialized mining hardware it ran, so the logical move was to sell off the machines and rent out the megawatts to large industrial customers.
The missing piece was knowing who those customers would be. That became clear in March 2024, when Core Scientific and CoreWeave announced an arrangement to turn a mining site in Austin, Texas, into an AI data center, with Core Scientific supplying power and buildings to CoreWeave as a tenant. Gagnon described the announcement as his "big aha moment," because it showed exactly the kind of buyer that would pay for a miner's electricity.
3. A Boardroom Crisis and Riot Platforms' Hostile Bid
Executing the plan required first surviving a period of turmoil inside Bitfarms. The board was searching for its third chief executive in five years. The sitting CEO agreed to step down and then, in May 2024, sued the company for $27 million, alleging wrongful termination and breach of contract.
Riot Platforms then moved in with a hostile offer worth $930 million, or $2.30 per share, a price roughly 75% below the stock's late-2021 peak. Bitfarms responded with a poison pill defense, while Riot launched a website attacking the company's governance and calling for the removal of its interim chief, one of Bitfarms' co-founders.
The board turned to Gagnon to end the fight and carry out his transformation plan, naming him CEO in July 2024. A settlement gave Riot the right to appoint a director, and the co-founder left the board. Riot called off its campaign and later sold its stake.
4. From Taipei Police Raids to Pennsylvania Waste Coal
Gagnon's route to the top of a mining company was unconventional. The son of American parents who settled in Hong Kong, he attended international schools with a strong emphasis on Mandarin, then earned a bachelor's degree in business and economics, with a Mandarin minor, from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business in 2011.
He likes to recall that he could once have bought Bitcoin at 73 cents but spent the money on beer instead. Over the following three and a half years, the asset climbed roughly 1,400-fold to above $1,000.
He went back to Hong Kong to earn a master's degree in computer security and networking at the University of Hong Kong, a program that included coursework in cryptography. After less than two years as a network technician for a firm that built mobile apps for investor events, he quit and moved to Taiwan.
In Taipei, he set up an Ethereum mine in the home of his future in-laws, convinced the network was "Bitcoin 2.0" and determined not to miss a second opportunity. The operation drew about ten times the electricity of a typical household, which led local police to suspect a marijuana grow. Officers raided the house about once a week until, after a couple of months, he relocated the equipment. A later mine in Guangzhou, China, ran for two years before regulatory pressure shut it down.
Gagnon joined Bitfarms in 2019, drawn by the cheap hydroelectric power in Quebec, and took on the role of chief of development, leading expansion into the United States and other energy-rich parts of Canada.
In Alberta, he went after natural gas that was being flared at wells with no pipeline connection. Bitfarms built containerized, generator-driven Bitcoin data centers for drillers and offered them full financing. Because that stranded gas cost around 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with roughly 6 cents in the United States, drillers recovered the equipment cost quickly, and the offering became a success for the company.
In 2023, he set his sights on Stronghold Digital, a Pennsylvania company whose plants burned waste coal, the leftover piles from the state's long mining history, and collected state subsidies for doing so. Two entrepreneurs had converted Stronghold's sites to Bitcoin mining in 2021, but the company overspent on equipment and by 2023 was struggling under debt and litigation. Gagnon saw its eastern and western Pennsylvania locations as strong candidates for AI campuses and began seeking new power allocations. In August 2024, about a month after becoming CEO, he agreed to buy Stronghold for $175 million.
5. Why Power Is the Bottleneck for AI
Electricity, not chips or software, is now widely described by AI leaders as the binding constraint on growth. OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman has said the limit is power rather than code, Elon Musk has pointed to power shortages keeping chips from being switched on, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel has called access to megawatts a "big constraint."
Politics is tightening that squeeze. On Election Day, November 3, 2026, voters who favored limits on data centers won races, which makes power that is already secured even more valuable. Gagnon calls this "bird in the hand economics."
Keel was among the first and largest miners to make the switch, and more than ten major players have followed. Riot has signed a $9.1 billion lease with Anthropic in Milam County, Texas. Hut 8 holds a $7 billion contract tied to Google and Anthropic at River Bend, Louisiana. Applied Digital has an $11 billion agreement with CoreWeave in Ellendale, North Dakota.
The converts fall into two groups. Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, Genesis Digital and Keel have left mining entirely, while Riot, Hut 8, HIVE Digital Technologies and TeraWulf run hybrid operations that keep some mining alongside their AI business.
6. Developer Versus Compute Provider: Two Business Models
Former miners entering AI generally choose between two approaches. A compute provider delivers a turnkey project: a builder, often a real estate investment trust, constructs the facility and leases it long term, and the provider fills it with graphics processors, the most expensive part, then rents out computing capacity to hyperscalers or neoclouds running models such as Gemini and Claude.
A developer, by contrast, supplies only the building and the power, while the tenant, such as Microsoft or Crusoe, brings its own processors. Upfront spending is far lower, and the developer leases what the industry calls powered shells, earning a substantial markup on scarce electricity.
The economics of either path dwarf Bitcoin mining. Christian Lopez of Cohen & Co. estimates five-year value at $1.7 million per kilowatt for Bitcoin mining versus $7.9 million for an AI campus, nearly five times as much. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has said each gigawatt of AI data center capacity produces about $10 billion in revenue, roughly five times what a comparable Bitcoin mine generates.
Compute-focused rivals include Bitdeer in Singapore, IREN in Australia, HIVE and, in part, Hut 8. They collect higher rents but accept shorter leases and more risk. HIVE has a five-year, $350 million deal with an unnamed AI company for campuses on Bell Canada sites; its CEO, Aydin Kilic, said the processors cost $190 million upfront and predicted the project will be far more profitable per kilowatt than mining.
7. Why Keel Chose to Be Strictly in the Power Business
Keel has deliberately picked the developer route. Processors can account for up to 70% of the roughly $50 billion cost of a one-gigawatt data center, and Keel wants no part of that spending. Its profit will come from the gap between what it pays utilities for electricity and what tenants pay in lease charges. Gagnon says the company is "strictly in the power business."
Its 2.2 gigawatts of approved or nearly approved capacity exceeds the 1.9 gigawatts OpenAI was reportedly lining up at the end of 2025. Gagnon concedes the model brings in less revenue than renting out chips but argues the cash flows will be steadier, and that customers will pay a premium to get power quickly.
His reasoning turns on margins. AI campuses can earn gross margins of around 85%, he says, with power and buildings making up only 2% to 4% of total costs. Because processors lose value fast, a tenant may happily accept margins closer to 81% to 83% in exchange for starting to earn revenue sooner, which leaves room for a developer with ready power to charge more.
8. Panther Creek, Sharon and Moses Lake
Three projects sit at the top of Keel's list. Panther Creek is a former Stronghold site about 85 miles north of Philadelphia. Sharon, acquired separately, is in western Pennsylvania near Youngstown, Ohio. Together, the two Pennsylvania sites are securing more than 450 megawatts from local grids. The third is a hydro-powered project in Moses Lake, Washington, near the field where Boeing repairs 737 MAX jets and positioned between Seattle, Spokane and Portland.
Each project needs zoning, environmental and development approvals. Moses Lake has all three and is already under construction. Sharon and Panther Creek have zoning and development sign-offs and are still working through environmental permits. Gagnon calls zoning the hardest hurdle, since it depends on local community politics. Beyond the priority list, Keel has applied for 1 gigawatt at Scrubgrass, a 700-acre former Stronghold site near Sharon, about an hour north of Pittsburgh, where permitting is at an early stage.
9. Why Did Keel Stock Fall?
Keel shares dropped about 20% after Gagnon told investors on the third-quarter earnings call that no leases would be signed this year. In May 2026, he had aimed to lock in tenants at all three priority sites by the end of 2026; on the call, he declined to offer new dates and pointed to final environmental permits as the main obstacle.
The delay matters because Keel has little revenue while it waits. Having left Bitcoin mining, it has not yet begun earning from AI. It raised nearly $600 million in convertible debt last year and about $300 million by selling its Bitcoin holdings, and its cash burn is high. Its market value now stands at roughly $1.3 billion, about where it was when Riot made its 2024 bid.
10. Location, Inference and What Comes Next for Keel
Gagnon argues that location will separate winners from losers. Early AI training work did not depend on where a data center sat, he says, but demand is shifting toward inference, the work of serving finished models to banks, research labs and call centers. Applications such as autonomous driving and chatbots need low latency, which favors sites close to population centers, and he says access to fiber has been an overlooked advantage.
He compares data centers to real estate, citing Loudoun County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and Quincy, near Seattle, as proven hubs. Keel's sites sit near New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and the company holds a strong position in the Pacific Northwest, where AI campuses are scarce. Gagnon reports rising interest in his Pennsylvania sites since the midterms, linking it to Democratic candidates in the state who backed responsible data center development. He sees Texas as the first major AI data center market and Pennsylvania as the second, and expects Keel to become the leading player there.
The next test is execution. Large AI companies have more processors than they can power, and former Bitcoin miners like Keel hold the electricity they need. What investors are waiting to learn is how quickly Keel can turn approved megawatts into signed leases, starting with environmental permits at Sharon and Panther Creek and continued construction at Moses Lake.