During Keel’s Q2 earnings, one item rose above the rest: the three AI leases – or lack thereof – that CEO Ben Gagnon called a “priority” on the company’s Q1 earnings call.

“Our 2026 priority is clear: sign three leases by year-end, one at Panther Creek, one at Sharon, and one at Moses Lake,” Gagnon said during the call for its Q1 results.

Fielding a followup on this assertion during the Q2 call, Gagnon navigated the analyst question without committing to a concrete timeline for these leases, much to the discontent of certain Keel investors, who jawed after the earnings call that Gagnon was walking back his prior guidance. 

There was so much armchair chatter on this topic, that it was the number one question listeners wanted us to ask on today’s Blockspace Live interview with Gagnon. So we put the question out in front.

“We remain incredibly confident here. The commercial process is going so smoothly across all three sites — we've got multiple high-quality tenants actively at three different tables, and everything that we've seen over the last couple of months is really only reinforcing our confidence in the assets, in the commercial process, and the demand for the power,” Gagnon said. 

“Everyone's looking at how you get 2027 delivery, and when you're so focused on 2027 delivery, you're frankly a lot more time-sensitive than we are as the developer, right?...whether or not it starts in March or April really does not matter in the grand scheme of things — these are 15- to 20-year agreements,” he continued.

No, Gagnon did not give a firm date or ensure that these deals would cross the finish line in 2026. But why should he? Investors excoriated him for his certainty the first time, and it seems to me that he’s being more judicious with forward guidance after internalizing that lesson. 

Put another way, I think critics are misreading prudence as prevarication. Gagnon's answers did not confirm the deals will land this year, but they didn’t rule out their completion, either. 

Hinting at how close Keel may be to a lease, he added that the company is “ focused on finalizing — double-checking, triple-checking — the engineering, the commercial side, the general contracting side, the equipment manufacturing side,” adding “that's really all that's left for us to be comfortable signing a lease.”

When that lease (or leases) come, Gagnon said they prefer a triple net structure, and he teased in his first response that the terms could span 15-20 years. 

He also said that the remaining environmental and construction permits for Panther Creek and Sharon are “very process-drive” and “not political,” that they hinge on very mundane sign-offs for sewage connection for employee facilities and stormwater runoff. 

“We haven't received anything in the permitting process that would give us pause, concern, or alarm — and nothing from the tenants either. These just continue to move forward at the same time that we're running the commercial process, and we have not had one concern from the tenants around the remaining permits at either of those sites,” he added.

All said, Keel’s Moses Lake, Washington site looks like the furthest along and most likely to secure the company’s first lease. Gagnon said Keel declined a 10 MW expansion option for this area because that power block “adjacent to our site…[came] with much longer timelines…[and] a lot of the costs just don't amortize as well” for a site that small.

I reckon Keel will announce a lease for Moses Lake sooner than later, and – so long as permitting clears – leases at Sharon and Panther Creek could be close behind.

-CMH

Today, we have back-to-back interviews with WhiteFiber CEO Sam Tabar and Keel CEO Ben Gagnon, and for news, we cover IREN’s completing the 50 MW phase 1 of its Childress data center for Microsoft and how a tiny rural town in Washington is cashing in on the data center boom. 

Microsoft accepted Horizon 1, a 50 MW critical IT load deployment at IREN’s Childress campus in Texas.

Horizon 1 is the first of four 50 MW deployments planned for 2026 under IREN’s five-year, $9.7 billion cloud-services agreement with Microsoft. The completed system uses direct-to-chip liquid cooling and Nvidia GB300 NVL72 infrastructure.

The four phases will provide 200 MW of combined critical IT load. IREN expects the remaining deployments to come online later this year. Nvidia also granted the project Exemplar Cloud status after testing its performance and reliability.

Morgan Stanley increased its Riot Platforms price target from $36 to $43 following the company’s new 191 MW Rockdale lease.

The 20-year agreement with an unnamed frontier AI lab carries $9.1 billion of contracted revenue. Morgan Stanley estimates the project will require $2.2 billion of construction spending and generate about $387 million of annual EBITDA.

Riot now has 241 MW of contracted critical IT load at Rockdale. The bank increased its valuation for Riot’s signed leases by roughly $4 billion while maintaining an Overweight rating.

Morgan Stanley cut its TeraWulf target from $72 to $62.50 while maintaining an Overweight rating.

The revision came primarily from a higher fully diluted share count. Morgan Stanley now uses 624.8 million shares in its calculation, an increase of about 65 million quarter over quarter due to warrant exercises, convertible-note conversions and omnibus shares.

The bank assigned $39.5 billion of value to TeraWulf’s HPC operations. Signed leases accounted for $12.9 billion, while another $24 billion came from 2,082 MW of owned sites.

Morgan Stanley raised its MARA target from $5.50 to $6 after increasing the probability assigned to future AI and HPC leases.

The bank raised its base-case energization probability for MARA’s 2,044 MW pipeline from 10% to 15%. That doubled the estimated value of the pipeline to about $2 billion.

MARA expects its Starwood joint venture to secure at least two leases before year-end. Morgan Stanley maintained an Underweight rating, with its new target implying 38% downside from the price used in the report.

KBW lowered its Bitdeer price target from $14 to $10 after the company’s second-quarter results.

The firm cited concerns about tenant credit at Tydal, limited visibility into Bitdeer’s colocation pipeline and the prospect of future equity issuance. Analyst Stephen Glagola maintained a Market Perform rating.

Bitdeer traded at $9.02 when the note was published, giving the revised target an implied return of about 11%.

Needham maintained its Buy rating and $38 WhiteFiber target after the company added more than $540 million of cloud contracts.

WhiteFiber generated $28.8 million of second-quarter revenue, up 54% from last year and above Needham’s $22 million estimate. Adjusted EBITDA reached $5.5 million.

Needham raised its 2026 revenue and EBITDA estimates as WhiteFiber began billing capacity at NC-1. The $38 target implied about 33% upside from the previous close.

CoreWeave signed a three-year AI contract using Nvidia A100 GPUs, extending the commercial life of hardware introduced six years ago.

CoreWeave Chief Development Officer Brannin McBee said A100 pricing has held firm over the past 12 to 18 months and recently increased. The new agreement runs through 2029.

The contract adds evidence that older GPUs can continue generating revenue after their original customer terms, extending the useful life assumed in some neocloud investment models.

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