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

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 Bitcoin mining entirely and re-channeling its plentiful flow of megawatts to power-craving industrial users.

The big revelation came in March 2024 when Core Scientific and CoreWeave unveiled a deal where Bitcoin titan Core Scientific would refashion a mining facility in Austin, Texas, as an AI data center. "It was the big aha moment," recalls Gagnon. "Suddenly, we saw who the right customer was." At the time, Bitfarms was mired in turmoil, with its board searching for its third leader in five years and facing a hostile $930 million takeover bid from Riot Platforms at $2.30 a share.

The Big Pivot

In July 2024, Gagnon took the helm at Bitfarms, helping broker an agreement where Riot named a director and halted its attack. While battling for Bitfarms' independence, Gagnon kept his sights locked on engineering the transformation. "We'd shift our focus entirely to addressing the defining constraint of the most important technology of our lifetime," 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."

From Bitcoin to AI

The venture needed a rebrand, so Gagnon picked "Keel" to evoke the structural backbone of a vessel that "provides stability and converts energy into forward motion. On April 1, 2026, the franchise was reborn as Keel Infrastructure and changed its domicile from Canada to the U.S. Gagnon's X profile photo shows him grinning from a porthole-sized frame, sporting his usual oversized rimless glasses, and a gold-braided yachtsman's cap displaying his user name, Captain Keel."

Gagnon, now 37, is attempting to pull a hat trick seldom seen in the corporate world: the total reinvention of a large enterprise. His career has careened from mining Bitcoin in remote oil patches by rescuing flared natural gas to rehabilitating some of the world's dirtiest energy sites under the banner of AI. He gained a bachelor's degree in business and economics at Indiana University in 2011, where he recalls getting fascinated by Bitcoin but instead "did what every college kid does. I bought beer."

Powering the Future

Gagnon doubled-down on a possible acquisition that ideally fitted the new plotline: Stronghold Digital, a startup using an unusual model in Bitcoin mining. Stronghold owned sites in Pennsylvania that had been performing a public service by scooping waste coal and burning it in their boilers to supply electricity to local grids. In 2021, entrepreneurs turned those locations into Bitcoin mining operations, but by 2023 Stronghold was foundering, hammered by crippling debt and legal disputes.

Gagnon identified Stronghold's locations as ideal for AI campuses. Working with its owners, he applied to utilities and state authorities for big new batches of megawatts. Once assured the approvals were in hand, Gagnon landed an agreement to purchase Stronghold for $175 million in August 2024. Increasingly, AI leaders are viewing power as the toughest chokepoint in the AI supply chain. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman characterizes the issue, "The bottleneck for AI isn't code, it's electrons."