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KEEL

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Thesis. The purest "one lease away" story on the watchlist — 2.2 GW of development pipeline with real grid interconnection, $819M of liquidity and a president poached from Digital Realty — but nothing signed, while legacy Bitcoin revenue collapses and costs climb.
Reviewed 19 Sep 2026, after the 9 Sep PowerSecure agreement for Moses Lake. Next review after Q3 2026 earnings on 12 Nov 2026.

What it does

Keel was a Bitcoin miner. It has exited mining and is rebuilding itself as an AI datacentre landlord: it owns land with grid connections, builds the powered shell, and rents it to a tenant who brings their own GPUs. That is a very different business from a GPU cloud. The landlord carries no chip-obsolescence risk and no utilisation risk, signs longer contracts, and earns a lower ceiling on returns. It is closer to a REIT than to a compute provider. Same model as
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CIFR. CEO is Ben Gagnon.
The scarce asset is not the building. It is the interconnection — permission from the utility to draw hundreds of megawatts at a given site. Queues for new interconnects run years, so an existing one is close to unreproducible.
Everything Keel owns is optionality on someone else signing. The pipeline has value only at the moment a tenant converts it into contracted revenue.

Bull case

  • 2.2 GW development pipeline across Pennsylvania, Washington and Québec, with established grid interconnections — the genuinely scarce asset
  • Panther Creek (PA): 350 MW secured, expandable to 510 MW, operational target H2 2027. Plus Sharon (PA) and Moses Lake (WA)
  • Sherbrooke (QC): conditional agreement for 96 MW of existing capacity
  • $819M of liquidity as of 7 Aug, from a $458M convertible note raise plus conversion of 1,085 Bitcoin into $75M. Still holds 1,861 BTC
  • Ganesh Aiyer hired as President (6 Jul), previously Chief Business Officer at Digital Realty Trust — an operator brought in specifically to convert pipeline into signed leases
  • PowerSecure agreement (9 Sep) to supply the backup power platform at Moses Lake — a vendor commitment that only makes sense if the site is being readied for a tenant
  • CEO Gagnon's framing: "Power is the constraint. Everything else is downstream of it."

Bear case

  • Zero signed hyperscale leases. Three sites in "active negotiations." Management has been guiding to three hyperscale customers by year-end for months
  • Q2 2026 revenue $30.4M, down 50% YoY as legacy Bitcoin revenue collapses — Moses Lake mining shut in April and BTC prices fell. A slight beat against $28.18M consensus
  • EPS −$0.11 against −$0.05 expected, a six-cent miss. Loss from continuing operations $64M, against $13M of income a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations −$23.7M
  • G&A up 62% to $31.3M — senior hiring well ahead of any revenue
  • 2026 revenue consensus cut from $145.5M to $123.9M; loss forecast widened to −$0.355/share
  • Beta 4.1, the highest on the watchlist. The stock fell ~9% on the print to ~$3.54, roughly half its June level of $7.36
  • Construction, permitting and power-delivery execution risk on every site

Major customers

  • None yet. No hyperscale tenant has signed
  • Three unnamed prospects in active negotiation across Panther Creek, Sharon and Sherbrooke
  • Legacy revenue is self-operated Bitcoin mining, now winding down
  • Counterparty on the Sherbrooke 96 MW agreement is Hydro-Sherbrooke — a power capacity transfer, not a customer lease. Worth keeping the two straight when headlines conflate them
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Read-through. Keel is the same landlord model as
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CIFR at a much earlier stage. Cipher converted its pipeline into $11.4B of contracted revenue, with Google backstopping Fluidstack and a 15-year AWS lease. Keel has converted nothing, and that gap is the entire difference between the two — it is what the share price reflects. Neither name moves with
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CRWV,
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NBIS or
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IREN on GPU-cycle news, because neither buys GPUs. A Keel lease signing would be read across to Cipher's remaining uncontracted capacity as evidence the bid for powered shells is broad rather than Google-specific.

What would change the view

  1. Any signed hyperscale lease. This is the only thing that matters — term, megawatts, counterparty credit
  2. Panther Creek construction milestones against the H2 2027 energisation target
  3. Cash burn against the $819M, with G&A running $31.3M a quarter on minimal revenue
  4. Whether the Sherbrooke 96 MW conditional agreement closes
  5. Remaining Bitcoin holdings (1,861 BTC) and whether more are converted to fund construction
  6. Whether Aiyer's Digital Realty relationships produce an actual counterparty rather than a pipeline slide

Update log

19 Sep 2026 — Converted to the standard template. Checked for news since the Q2 print: the 9 Sep PowerSecure agreement for backup power at Moses Lake and the 20 Aug statement supporting Pennsylvania's GRID standards are the only items. No lease has been signed, so the central thesis is unchanged.
11 Sep 2026 — Properties refreshed.
10 Aug 2026 — Q2 2026 reported. Revenue $30.4M (−50% YoY), EPS −$0.11 vs −$0.05 expected, loss from continuing operations $64M, G&A +62% to $31.3M. Stock −9% on the print. Three sites described as in active negotiation; none converted.
15 Jul 2026 — Sherbrooke conditional agreement for 96 MW of existing capacity.
6 Jul 2026 — Ganesh Aiyer, ex-Chief Business Officer at Digital Realty Trust, hired as President.
Research and education only — not investment advice.