Fifteen months ago, Ben Gagnon was calling his company’s bitcoin mining business “strong.” Now he’s overseeing the total demolition of the facilities that housed it.
Gagnon, CEO of Keel Infrastructure — the company formerly known as Bitfarms — told CNBC on Tuesday that the firm is tearing down its bitcoin mining sites entirely and replacing them with new data centers built for artificial intelligence workloads. It’s not a partial conversion. “It’s the complete demolition of the bitcoin mining facilities that were there,” he said, describing a full rebuild at every site.
A Sharp Turn From “Bullish” to Bulldozed
The shift marks one of the most aggressive pivots among publicly traded bitcoin miners, a group that includes MARA, Hut 8, and CleanSpark, many of which are also leaning into AI infrastructure to varying degrees. But Keel’s approach stands out for its finality — there’s no hedging bets on a bitcoin mining comeback once these facilities come down.
That’s a stark reversal from where the company stood in May 2025. Back then, under its old Bitfarms name, Gagnon described the bitcoin business as strong and said the company remained bullish on its mining economics following fleet upgrades. Even so, the seeds of the current pivot were already visible — the company was directing new capital toward its U.S. energy and HPC portfolio rather than buying more mining hardware.
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The Numbers Behind the Pivot
The rebrand from Bitfarms to Keel became official in April, and the wind-down of the bitcoin business has moved quickly since. The company sold 1,085 BTC for $75 million between April 1 and August 7, leaving 1,861 BTC remaining on its balance sheet. Shares dropped more than 11% on Monday after Keel reported that quarterly revenue from continuing operations had fallen 50% year over year to $30 million.
Bitcoin’s price decline hasn’t helped the case for staying in mining. The cryptocurrency traded above $110,000 in May 2025; it now sits around $64,000, a drop that’s squeezed margins across the mining industry.
Why AI Won Out
Gagnon framed the shift as an industry-wide realization rather than a Keel-specific bet. Bitcoin miners spent years building massive energy portfolios assuming bitcoin mining was the best way to monetize them, he said. That assumption broke down once the HPC wave took hold in 2024, when it became clear that converting those energy assets into AI and high-performance computing infrastructure offered far greater value.
For Keel, that realization now means literally rebuilding from the ground up — trading mining rigs for data centers built to power the AI boom instead.
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