From Bitcoin Rigs to Powered Shells: How Keel Is Betting $900 Million on AI

Keel Infrastructure controls 2.2 gigawatts of approved or near-approved power — more than the 1.9 GW OpenAI had reportedly marshaled at the close of 2025 — and holds roughly $900 million in raised capital, yet signed zero AI leases this year and carries a market cap of about $1.3 billion. That is the arithmetic behind one of the boldest corporate reinventions now underway: a total exit from Bitcoin mining into selling megawatts to the AI buildout.

The story starts with a $27 million lawsuit and a $930 million hostile bid. In May 2024, Bitfarms' then-CEO, still in the job, sued the Quebec-based Bitcoin miner for wrongful termination and breach of contract. Two days after the board fired him, Riot Platforms launched a hostile takeover at $2.30 a share — 75% below the late-2021 peak. Riot built a website, "A Better Bitfarms," attacking governance and demanding the interim chief's departure.

The board turned to Ben Gagnon, then 34, chief mining officer and a veteran of makeshift crypto rigs in Hong Kong and Taipei. He took the helm in July 2024 and brokered peace within months: Riot named a director, the co-founder left the board, and Riot has since sold its shares.

Why leave Bitcoin entirely?

Gagnon had concluded in late 2023 that Bitfarms' real asset was not the GPU racks but the megawatts behind them. The catalyst came in March 2024, when Core Scientific agreed to convert an Austin, Texas mining site into an AI data center leased to neocloud CoreWeave. "It was the big aha moment," Gagnon recalls. "Suddenly, we saw who the right customer was."

The economics explain the stampede. Christian Lopez, head of blockchain and digital assets at Cohen & Co., estimates five-year cash flow of $1.7 million per KW for Bitcoin versus $7.9 million — almost five times as much — for an AI campus. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar puts revenues at $10 billion per gigawatt of AI capacity, roughly five times a Bitcoin mine's take.

On April 1, 2026, the company was reborn as Keel Infrastructure, domiciled in the U.S. The name evokes a vessel's backbone that, in Gagnon's words, "provides stability and converts energy into forward motion."

How big are the competing deals?

More than ten major crypto operators are making the switch in part or whole:

• Riot: a $9.1 billion lease from Anthropic at Milam County, Texas
• Hut 8: a $7 billion contract with Google and Anthropic at River Bend, Louisiana
• Applied Digital: an $11 billion CoreWeave agreement in Ellendale, North Dakota
• HIVE: a $350 million, 5-year AI deal on Bell Canada sites, with $190 million of GPU costs up front

Two models divide the field. Compute providers — Bitdeer, IREN, HIVE, Hut 8 in part — buy the GPUs, roughly 70% of the $50 billion-per-GW cost of a data center, and lease the full package for higher rents, shorter leases and more risk. Keel chose the developer route: powered shells only, no hardware. "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.

The margin math favors speed, he argues: data centers run 85% gross margins, with power and buildings costing at most 2% to 4%, so customers accept 81–83% margins to start earning in six months rather than twelve.

What are the delays and the cash burn?

Keel is shepherding three priority projects: Panther Creek, 85 miles north of Philadelphia; Sharon, near Youngstown, Ohio, with over 450 MW combined in securing; and a hydro site in Moses Lake, Washington, already under construction after clearing zoning, environmental and development approvals. The largest prize is Scrubgrass, a 700-acre ex-Stronghold site near Pittsburgh, where Keel has applied for 1 GW — 40% of its total capacity pipeline.

Keel bought foundering Stronghold Digital for $175 million in August 2024 after securing utility approvals. But 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 fell about 20%. Keel raised nearly $600 million in convertible debt last year plus almost $300 million from selling its Bitcoin trove, but with mining gone and AI revenue not yet flowing, cash is burning fast.

Where does the demand come from?

Power is now the chokepoint. "The bottleneck for AI isn't code, it's electrons," Sam Altman has said. Elon Musk agrees that power is "the limiting factor," and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel calls megawatt access a "big constraint." Election Day wins by candidates favoring restraints on data centers likely raised the scarcity value of power the crypto cohort already controls — what Gagnon calls "bird in the hand economics."

Gagnon sees the market shifting toward inference compute near customers — banks, research labs, call centers — favoring his sites near New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. "The differentiator will be location, location and location," he says, adding that Pennsylvania demand jumped after Democrats who won there ran on responsible data center development.

The big players hold too many GPUs and too few megawatts. Gagnon holds the power. The open question is how fast he can switch it on.