Meet ‘Captain Keel,’ the 37-year-old steering a Bitcoin miner into the AI data center gold rush

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Ben Gagnon is turning Bitfarms into Keel Infrastructure, swapping crypto for the one thing AI giants can’t get enough of: power.

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. The then 34-year-old chief mining officer who’d launched his career crafting makeshift crypto-minting rigs in Hong Kong and Taipei, reckoned that Bitfarms could make much more money by exiting the field full stop, demolishing the “mines,” selling the chips that filled them, and re-channeling its plentiful flow of megawatts to power-craving industrial users at plants newly built on the Bitfarms sites.

The big revelation came in March of 2024, when Core Scientific and CoreWeave unveiled a stunning new deal. 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. That Bitcoin-to-AI play struck Gagnon as a model that Bitfarms could follow on a grand scale, from Quebec to Washington state. “It was the big aha moment,” recalls Gagnon. “Suddenly, we saw who the right customer was.”

At the time, Bitfarms was mired in turmoil. In early 2024, the board was searching for its third leader in five years. The sitting chief agreed to depart when Bitfarms named a successor, but in May—believe it or not while still CEO—instead filed a $27 million suit for “wrongful termination and breach of contract,” plunging this Canadian exemplar of all-green, hydro-driven Bitcoin mining into legal warfare. Pounded by a sharp drop in the token’s prices, Bitfarms’ stock was languishing, and a rival pounced. 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.

The board tapped Gagnon to both quell the war versus Riot, and pursue the strategy of total transformation he’d been advocating.

While battling for Bitfarms’ independence, Gagnon…

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