A bitcoin miner just shut its last American mine and turned the power over to AI. This is a story about repositioning, and what the middle costs.
There is a building in Washington State that used to produce Bitcoin and currently produces nothing at all. The machines have gone. The power contract has not. Sometime in the next couple of years, if everything goes to plan, that same electricity will run artificial intelligence workloads for a tenant who has not yet signed.
That is a story about repositioning, and it is a great deal less glamorous than the word suggests.
What happened
The company is Keel Infrastructure, which many people still recognise by its former name, Bitfarms. It reported second quarter results this week, and they were bruising. Revenue roughly halved from a year earlier to around $30 million. The net loss came in at nearly $65 million, against a profit in the same quarter last year. Every one of its American Bitcoin mining sites has now been decommissioned. It sold well over 1000 Bitcoin during the wind-down to help fund the transition. The shares fell around a tenth on the day.
The chief executive, Ben Gagnon, framed the strategy in a line I have not been able to shake. “Power is the constraint. Everything else is downstream of it.”
He is right, and the entire pivot rests on it. Mining and AI data centres want the same scarce thing: a legal, connected, permitted supply of electricity at scale. Keel already owns that. What it does not yet own is a customer.
The unglamorous middle
Here is what I want you to notice, because it applies to you far more directly than the share price does.
Repositioning is not a montage. In the version we tell ourselves, you recognise that the old model has stopped working, you make a brave decision, and you emerge transformed on the other side. In the version that actually happens, you spend the better part of two years losing money, explaining yourself to people who preferred the old you, and waiting on permits that are taking longer than anticipated. That is not failure. That is the middle. It simply looks identical to failure from the outside, and it feels identical from the inside.
I know this because I have lived a version of it, on a scale several zeros smaller. When I stopped doing the thing I was known for and started doing this, the gap was not a leap. It was a long, awkward, expensive walk across a room, during which I had no income from the old work and very little from the new, and several people asked, gently, whether I had thought this through.
I had. I had not budgeted for how long the middle lasts.
What the market is really pricing
Notice that the market is not disagreeing with the strategy. Investors have been enthusiastic about miners turning into AI infrastructure for a while, which is precisely why these shares had run up beforehand. What the market punished in the results was the absence of a signed lease. Strategy is cheap. Evidence is expensive.
That is the same test everyone faces. Nobody objects to a plan. They wait for the first proof that it works.
Keel is not alone in this, either. Several listed miners have been reducing their Bitcoin holdings and pointing their sights at high-performance computing instead. When an entire sector quietly changes what it is for, that tells you something about the economics of the old business, not merely about enthusiasm for the new one. I looked at how much of this infrastructure story sits outside British conversation in The Chip Wobble Britain Did Not Notice.
What I take from it
I hold no view worth sharing on this particular company, and none of this is a nudge toward it or away from it. What I take from the story is a way of reading these announcements when they arrive.
When a business you follow declares a repositioning, the question is not whether the new direction is clever. The new direction is almost always clever, because clever is easy to write. The questions are whether it has the balance sheet to survive the middle, and whether it has produced any evidence yet.
Ask that of the companies you own. Then, and this is the harder one, ask it of yourself. If you are somewhere in the middle of your own repositioning, and a fair number of people reading this will be, the honest questions are the same two. Can you fund the gap? And what is the first piece of evidence you could put on the table?
The building in Washington State is empty for now. Empty on purpose is a very different thing from empty by accident. It is worth knowing which one you are.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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