$KEEL: Leopold-Backed Vera Rubin AI Infra Setup Where 3 Leases Could Unlock a Multi-Bagger Rerate

Keel, originally known as Bitfarms, is trying to become a high-density AI/HPC infrastructure company by converting power-heavy legacy mining assets into data center campuses and leaving bitcoin behind entirely. The legendary investor Leopold had originally invested in this stock, and upped his stake by 188% in recent filings.

In this AI cycle, the bottleneck is not just GPUs anymore. It is power. Every hyperscaler, neocloud, and enterprise AI customer needs secured electricity, interconnections, land, cooling, and locations that can be brought online quickly. GPUs are useless if there is nowhere to plug them in.

Jensen Huang said at the GTC Taipei stage that future data centers will cost $80B-$100B per GW, which shows how essential and bottlenecked power is in the AI trade. This also shows the long-term potential of Keel and how truly undervalued this stock is at a $3.2B market cap when it already has a 2.2 GW pipeline. With 50% of data centers facing delays or cancellations, the value of immediate power becomes even more pronounced.

Management has been very confident and stated that they plan to sign three leases this year across three different sites: Panther Creek (350 MW energized capacity/expansion to 510 MW, Pennsylvania), Sharon (110 MW energized capacity, Pennsylvania), and Moses Lake (18 MW energized capacity, near Seattle). However, since these leases have not been signed yet, there is still risk with this stock. But that is also why the upside is still there.

Yesterday in an interview, the CEO said he was even MORE confident that they will sign 3 leases this year compared to a month ago.

The stock has gone up a lot over the past month, but in my opinion the market is only starting to price in the possibility that Keel gets a lease this year and transitions away from a bitcoin miner. It is not fully pricing in the possibility of three leases, strong AI/HPC customers, premium PJM locations, Vera Rubin-ready sites, project financing, and the rest of the 2.2 GW pipeline.

Every lease that gets signed is an immediate catalyst for the stock and a re-rate on the stock price. This can be seen with any AI infrastructure company in this space after they land a contract. The other two sites in the pipeline for 2027+ are Sherbrooke (96 MW energized capacity/expansion to 170 MW, Quebec), and the massive gigacampus Scrubgrass (1.3 GW expansion capacity, Pennsylvania).

The two most important sites for the current state of the company are Panther Creek, Pennsylvania, and Sharon, Pennsylvania. These are the PJM sites, and I do not think they should be valued like generic data center land. PJM power is valuable because it is close to East Coast enterprise demand, cloud regions, fiber routes, financial institutions, large population centers, and future inference workloads. This region also has many data center delays, which makes these assets even more valuable.

I think people are underestimating how important inference is going to be. Training gets all the attention, but inference is where AI becomes a recurring usage business. Every AI agent, copilot, chatbot, coding assistant, search product, customer support tool, financial model, healthcare workflow, or enterprise automation tool creates inference demand every time it runs. That demand has long-term staying power, and locations close to major enterprise/cloud demand should deserve a premium.

The Vera Rubin angle is one of the biggest parts of the bull case because Keel is not just building generic GPU warehouses. Its official website lists both Panther Creek and Sharon around 2027 Vera Rubin GPUs+, which puts the Pennsylvania sites in the next generation of AI infrastructure. That matters because Rubin-class deployments require far more advanced power density, liquid cooling, networking, and engineering than older GPU facilities, so not many converted mining assets will be able to compete if Keel actually pulls this off.

This is why the lease potential could be huge. A customer is not just paying for land and power; they would be paying for a scarce, PJM-located, next-gen AI factory site that can support the most advanced NVIDIA systems. If Keel signs a serious Vera Rubin-focused contract at Panther Creek or Sharon, that could be the kind of validation that forces the market to stop valuing it like a Bitcoin miner transformation story and start valuing it like premium AI infrastructure. Another possible outcome is that customers start with current GPUs and scale into Rubin-class deployments over the life of the lease.

Another thing I think people miss is that waiting to come to market may have actually helped Keel. A year ago, the AI infrastructure market was not as hot as it is now. Today, companies are seeing real productivity gains from AI, hyperscalers are spending aggressively, and demand for power/data center capacity is at all-time highs. Just recently, Google said it is raising $80B in equity to help finance AI infrastructure, which Berkshire helped finance partially. The AI buildout is becoming a physical infrastructure race. If Keel has scarce powered sites in premium locations, waiting until demand got this intense could allow them to negotiate much more lucrative deals than if they rushed earlier.

One of the more bullish things I heard from the CEO is that Sharon attracted more interest than they initially expected. They thought enterprise customers, such as financial institutions, might prefer Moses Lake because it is smaller and more manageable, but Sharon also saw a lot of interest. The CEO said in a recent interview that enterprises could be giving more premium rates as compared to hyperscalers.

Right now, the main obstacle is permits and execution. The CEO believes that after permits are processed, leases shouldn't be much of a problem getting signed soon after. Demand is not the question. The question is whether Keel can get the sites through the permit process and build the data centers. The CEO believes that zoning is the most important part because that is where the emotional and political risk usually sits. Local opposition, city meetings, land-use issues, and political pushback can delay or kill data center projects.

Once zoning is cleared, the remaining steps are still important, but they are more technical: building permits, engineering, utilities, interconnection work, cooling design, construction, and final customer requirements. There is still risk, but now much more controllable.

That is why I think the recent permit progress matters. Zoning has been cleared for all 3 sites. Sharon is also being put on a fast-track permitting path. So far the CEO said permit progress across the 3 sites has been going very well. KEEL has a dedicated person handling permits with decades of permitting experience specifically in Pennsylvania.

Moses Lake getting almost most/all of its permits approved is also bullish. The closest catalyst is the Moses Lake lease. There is a massive rumor going around on X that the customer will be Amazon. This is because of this job posting uploaded recently: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/10435734/data-center-manager

The location for this Data Center Manager role is for Moses Lake, and job requirements say that the data center may not be operational. There are only 2 data centers in that area, and only Keel is about to be under construction. This is also a GovCloud contract, which requires US citizenship for all personnel with administrative access, a federal compliance obligation that aligns directly with Keel's recent redomiciliation from Canada to Delaware. One of the reasons for this redomiciliation is to potentially lock in government contracts.

Adding further weight to the thesis, Wayne Duso, a former AWS VP who spent twelve years building cloud infrastructure businesses at Amazon, sits on Keel's board of directors, which could have been intentional to facilitate this exact relationship. Finally, the role requires the new hire to travel to established sites for training until their assigned facility becomes operational, which rules out the only other data center in Moses Lake, Serverfarm's TiTAN, since that facility has been operational since 2021 with an existing management team already in place.

A first contract with AWS, even at just 18-28MW, proves Keel can execute, which is the single most important milestone for a company with zero signed leases, and immediately accelerates conversations at Panther Creek and Sharon where the real scale lives. GovCloud contracts are structurally premium: single-tenant, long-term, with Amazon parent-level credit backing, meaning even a small site could have a very lucrative offer. With Seattle considering a 365-day data center moratorium, already-permitted/advanced sites elsewhere in Washington become more valuable as well. The first contract transforms Keel overnight from a speculative former Bitcoin miner into a contracted federal-grade AI infrastructure operator with the world's largest cloud company as its anchor tenant.

This is purely speculation, I would not bank on this being true, and please do not invest in this stock solely for this reason. This whole thesis stems from a single job posting, if it were true it would be crazy though. Just wanted to share it because it is a very cool theory on X. Don’t be bummed out if it’s not Amazon, what matters the absolute most is the lease terms. Enterprise could possible pay more than Amazon.

All of the locations Keel has picked have been strategic: Pennsylvania/PJM for premium East Coast AI inference demand, Moses Lake for Pacific Northwest cloud access, and Québec for low-cost hydro-powered HPC optionality.

Keel originally had sufficient liquidity to advance all three sites through permitting and lease execution without raising additional capital, management was explicit about this on the Q1 earnings call. The $458 million convertible note offering recently, which was seven times oversubscribed, was therefore not a survival raise. It was a strategic and opportunistic raise designed to fund a second thrust the company had been communicating to shareholders, helping to secure expansion capacity at Scrubgrass and beyond Panther Creek's initial 350MW, assets the market is barely considering. Furthermore, this balance sheet shows immense strength when signing a lease from a potential client.

Keel now holds roughly $933 million in liquidity, the strongest balance sheet in the company's history. Critically, Ben Gagnon has not issued a single share under the ATM in over 12 months, signaling genuine discipline around dilution that most companies at this stage don't demonstrate. Capped calls also prevent dilution below $11.86 a share by 2032. Near-term dilution is not the primary risk.

Long term, yes, dilution is definitely possible, building hundreds of megawatts or multiple gigawatts of AI infrastructure is extremely capital intensive. But the bull case is that signed leases fundamentally change the financing equation. Once Keel has a creditworthy anchor tenant and contracted cash flows, it can access project-level debt, customer prepayments, joint ventures, and lease-backed financing structures instead of defaulting to common equity issuance.

I also think the later-stage pipeline is barely being priced in. Everyone is focused on the three 2026 lease targets, but Scrubgrass alone could become a major 2027-2028 driver. What makes Scrubgrass uniquely powerful is that it generates its own power behind the meter, meaning it bypasses the PJM interconnection queue entirely, eliminating the years-long grid delays that are crippling every other large-scale data center project in the region. Sitting in Pennsylvania with up to 1.3GW of potential capacity and no grid dependency, Scrubgrass could become one of the only true AI gigafactories in the most important market in the US, and the market is barely pricing it in.

The hiring is another positive sign. Keel recently brought in Jeff Martin, a former Oracle data center engineering executive, as VP of Data Center Engineering. That is exactly the kind of hire I want to see if this company is serious about executing. Building Vera Rubin-class AI data centers is not easy. Hiring someone with Oracle data center experience makes the story more credible because it suggests Keel is building an actual execution team, not just running a stock narrative.

$KEEL should also be added to the Russell 3000 by June 26th. I believe they should be added to the Russell 2000 as well but I am not sure, someone confirm that for me. This will help increase liquidity and institutional ownership.

Keel is also investing directly in the local communities around its sites. At Panther Valley Elementary, the company helped fund a revamped playground with ADA-compliant features as part of a broader $1M commitment to the school district over the next three years. This is not a revenue catalyst, but it matters because data center projects depend heavily on local trust, zoning support, and long-term community relationships.

However, there are still risks. Permits can take longer than expected. Construction can get delayed. Lease economics may be weaker than expected. Customers may not be the names people hope for. Vera Rubin/high-density data center execution is a major learning curve. Long-term financing can require dilution if project financing is not enough. And most importantly, the leases are not signed yet.

Management has had a good history of keeping promises and executing in 2025. They held up to their promises: acquired Stronghold, closed the Yguaza Paraguay sale, brought in HPC/AI partners, exited completely from Latin America, and US domiciliation.

If management executes, I think Keel has legitimate multi-bagger upside. The bull case is based on the market eventually valuing Keel as a real AI infrastructure platform with premium PJM power sites with Vera Rubin, and a 2.2 GW pipeline.

I did a DD on this company a while ago but to be honest it was kind of shit. I believe this clearly explains what the bull case for this company can be.

Last note: I trust the CEO. I heard this company used to be shit and he really turned it around. He gives me nerdy vibes but he’s like a good looking nerd and those are the people I trust the most.

https://preview.redd.it/p74236n95n6h1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=8d7145a6c4beffb80b8e48586198cc1e023903af

Here is a Q&A with the CEO Ben Gagnon and McNallie Money which I found very informative. If you are interested in this company, I definitely advise you to watch this to get a better idea of what this company's potential can be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r\_OOoFdzNUk

Here is the most recent Q&A talking about the offering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHdEu4CJqDk

Positions: 2297 at $5.22 in individual, 1795 at $5.24 in Roth, holding for the long term.

TL;DR: data centers, vera rubin, stock go 🚀🚀🚀