Meet ‘Captain Keel,’ the 37-year-old steering a Bitcoin miner into the AI data center gold rush
Bitcoin titan Core Scientific would refashion a mining facility in Austin, Texas, as an AI data center, and rent the power and buildings to the neocloud.
Key points
- In late 2023, Bitcoin miner Ben Gagnon concluded that his employer, Bitfarms of Quebec, was in the wrong business.
- For Gagnon, Bitfarms’ greatest value lay not in the giant racks of GPUs that generated Bitcoin, but the immense power supplies it controlled.
- After Bitfarms installed a “poison pill” defense, Riot launched a website dubbed “A Better Bitfarms” trashing allegedly poor corporate governance, and demanding the departure of the co-founder named as interim chief.
He describes the mission as “pursuing a strategy of 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.
Additional details
- That Bitcoin-to-AI play struck Gagnon as a model that Bitfarms could follow on a grand scale, from Quebec to Washington state.
- He’s now attempting to pull a hat trick seldom seen in the corporate world, the total reinvention of a large enterprise, including in product and nationality, on a crazy-rhythm beat.
- On April 1, 2026, the franchise was reborn as Keel Infrastructure and changed its domicile from Canada to the U.S.
- In July of 2024, Gagnon took the helm, and over the next few months, helped broker an agreement where Riot named a director of its choice, and the co-founder left the board.
- Two days after the board fired the CEO, Riot Platforms unveiled a hostile $930 million takeover bid for Bitfarms at a lowly $2.30 a share, 75% below its peak in late 2021.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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