Ben Gagnon has pulled off one of the most extreme corporate reinventions in recent memory: he took Bitfarms, a Canadian hydro-powered Bitcoin miner, killed its core business entirely, and relaunched it on April 1, 2026 as Keel Infrastructure, a U.S.-domiciled pure energy company serving AI data centers. The market isn't fully convinced. Keel's market cap sits at roughly $1.3 billion — about the same level as when rival Riot Platforms bid $930 million for the company in 2024.

Why abandon Bitcoin entirely?

The logic started forming in late 2023. Gagnon, then Bitfarms' 34-year-old chief mining officer, concluded the company's real asset wasn't the racks of chips. It was the megawatts. The epiphany arrived in March 2024, when Core Scientific and CoreWeave struck a deal converting an Austin, Texas mining site into an AI data center. "It was the big aha moment," Gagnon recalls. "Suddenly, we saw who the right customer was."

He took the top job in July 2024 amid chaos. Bitfarms' departing CEO had filed a $27 million wrongful-termination suit while still in office. Riot had launched a hostile $930 million bid at $2.30 a share — 75% below the stock's late-2021 peak — and a "poison pill" defense plus a settlement (Riot named a director, the co-founder left the board) ended the siege. Riot has since sold its shares.

Gagnon describes the strategy as "steering the business away from Bitcoin mining, and taking it over to a pure energy infrastructure play in support of AI and high-performance computing." The name "Keel" evokes a ship's backbone, which he says "provides stability and converts energy into forward motion" — a nod to stable long-term leases versus Bitcoin's storms.

How does the power math work?

The conversion economics are stark. Christian Lopez, head of blockchain and digital assets at Cohen & Co., estimates on the Schwab Network that a kilowatt generates about $1.7 million over five years in Bitcoin mining versus $7.9 million at an AI campus — nearly five times as much. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar puts revenue at $10 billion per gigawatt of AI data center capacity, versus roughly one-fifth that for a Bitcoin mine.

Keel chose the developer, or co-location (co-lo), model. It doesn't buy GPUs, which account for up to 70% of the roughly $50 billion-per-GW cost of an AI campus. "We're strictly in the power business, and make money on the difference between what we pay the utilities, and what the compute providers pay us on their leases," Gagnon says. Competitors like Riot ($9.1 billion Anthropic lease in Texas), Hut 8 ($7 billion with Google and Anthropic in Louisiana), and Applied Digital ($11 billion with CoreWeave in North Dakota) took bigger swings. More than ten major crypto operators have made the switch, in whole or in hybrid form.

What does Keel actually own?

The portfolio hinges on Stronghold Digital, a distressed Bitcoin miner whose Pennsylvania sites burn waste coal — black mountains of rock-laden scraps left by a century of mining — for subsidized grid power. Gagnon bought it for $175 million in August 2024, a month into his CEO tenure, after securing new megawatt approvals.

Keel now holds 2.2 GW approved or in final-stage approval, more than the 1.9 GW OpenAI was reportedly marshaling at the close of 2025. Three priority projects dominate:

• Panther Creek, 85 miles north of Philadelphia — a former Stronghold site.
• Sharon, in western Pennsylvania near Youngstown, Ohio. Together with Panther Creek, Keel is securing over 450 MW there.
• Moses Lake, Washington, a hydro project near Boeing's famous 737 MAX repair field. All three approvals — zoning, environmental, development — are secured and construction has begun.

The biggest prize is Scrubgrass, a 700-acre ex-Stronghold site near Pittsburgh where Keel has applied for 1 GW of power, 40% of its total target. It remains in early permitting.

Zoning is the hardest hurdle. "It's the one that's most political, most community-centric, and most emotional," Gagnon says.

Can Keel survive the gap?

Here's the squeeze. Keel has exited Bitcoin but signed no AI leases yet. In May, Gagnon guided to leases at all three priority projects by end-2026; on the Q3 call he said no deals will be signed this year and declined to give dates. The stock dropped about 20% on that announcement. Keel has raised almost $600 million in convertible debt and nearly $300 million more by selling its Bitcoin trove, but it's burning cash.

Gagnon's counterargument is gross-margin arithmetic: data centers run 85% gross margins, and leasing power and buildings costs customers only 2-4% of the total. "They're saying, I'd rather take a hit to 83% in gross margin and start generating revenue in 6 months than wait 12 months for a margin that's 2 points higher," he says. He calls Keel's hand "bird in hand economics" — megawatts ready now.

His location thesis leans on the shift from model training to "inference" (selling compute to banks, call centers and end users), where proximity to population centers matters. Election results strengthened his hand, he says: winning Pennsylvania Democrats ran on responsible data center development. "The differentiator will be location, location and location," Gagnon says. "Pennsylvania built this country... Texas was the first mover in AI data centers, and now Pennsylvania is the second mover. And we'll be number one in Pennsylvania."

The question now is speed. The giants have the GPUs — arguably too many. Gagnon has the power. How fast he can switch it on will decide whether "Captain Keel" is a turnaround legend or a cautionary tale.