There are pivots, and then there are transformations that make you check the paperwork twice. A company that begins as a Bitcoin mining operator and evolves into an energy infrastructure company developing AI data centers and GPU compute is the second kind. Guiding that transformation is a French-American executive whose own resume runs through fashion licensing before it ever touches a server rack.
Michel Amar is the Chairman and CEO of Digi PowerX, listed on Nasdaq: DGXX and Cboe Canada: DGX, a company he has led since February 2020. Under his direction, DigiPowerX has evolved from its digital-asset-mining roots toward a vertically integrated AI infrastructure model built around Tier III modular data centers, energy assets, and its NeoCloudz GPU-as-a-Service platform.
A Career That Started Somewhere Else Entirely
Michel’s path into data center infrastructure is not a straight line, and he does not pretend otherwise. From January 2007 to June 2012, he served as President of Maxrave, a division of BCBGMAXAZRIAGROUP, a five and a half year run in the fashion industry. From January 2016 to March 2025, nine years and three months, he was CEO of the NYAM Licensing Agency, working with fashion brands including Bebe and Catherine Malandrino, based in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.
That licensing and fashion career overlapped, for years, with his current role at DigiPowerX. He did not leave one industry cleanly before entering the next. According to DigiPowerX’s 2024 annual filing, he remained President of NYAM LLC while serving as CEO and Chairman of DigiPowerX.
Turning Mining Infrastructure Into AI Infrastructure
The core of Michel’s current story is the transformation of DigiPowerX itself. What began as a digital-asset mining-focused business has been evolving into a power-backed AI infrastructure and Tier III data-center platform. The NeoCloudz GPU-as-a-Service platform sits at the center of that pivot, designed to provide dedicated, bare-metal NVIDIA Blackwell compute from DigiPowerX-owned data-center infrastructure.
That transition is no longer only a strategy on paper. In April 2026, DigiPowerX announced its first AI revenue contract, a 24-month bare-metal GPU agreement with SubQ AI valued at approximately $19.6 million. The company said the service would operate through NeoCloudz at its AI data center, using NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and infrastructure engineered to Rated 3 standards, with redundant utility feeds, N+1 UPS, and a two-loop cooling architecture.
He is also a co-founder of US Data Centers (USDC), an independent venture focused on manufacturing, distributing, and deploying the ARMS modular AI data-center platform. The ARMS system is designed as a turnkey modular architecture for high-density AI computing, while DigiPowerX itself continues to develop and operate its own energy-backed digital infrastructure assets.
The Conviction Behind the Pivot
Ask Michel why an executive with a background in fashion licensing ended up steering a Nasdaq-listed AI infrastructure company, and the answer, as he frames it, comes down to a single belief about where value is migrating in the economy.
“AI infrastructure is the foundational utility of the next century,” he says, “and the future belongs to those who can deploy intelligence and power faster, cheaper, and closer to where they’re needed.”
It is a conviction that explains both halves of his current portfolio. NeoCloudz addresses the compute side of that equation, turning energy-backed infrastructure into GPU capacity, while USDC’s modular ARMS units address the deployment side, offering a standardized path toward rapidly deployable AI infrastructure on powered sites.
A Two-Track Career, Now Down to One
For nearly a decade, Michel effectively ran two executive careers on parallel tracks, one in fashion licensing spanning brands built on aesthetics and consumer identity, the other in energy and compute infrastructure built on watts and silicon. Since March 2025, following his departure from NYAM, that has narrowed to a single focus.
Six and a half years after taking the CEO role at DigiPowerX, and with the company now trading on Nasdaq and Cboe Canada under DGXX and DGX respectively, his trajectory reads as a case study in a particular kind of executive instinct: the willingness to recognize when an entire industry’s underlying value proposition has shifted, and to rebuild a company around that shift rather than simply riding out its old business model until it fails.
The transformation is becoming increasingly tangible. DigiPowerX reported in May 2026 that NeoCloudz was live with its first AI revenues, while its Columbiana, Alabama infrastructure continued expanding toward a larger high-density AI campus.
Whether that instinct first showed up while managing fashion brand licenses or watching Bitcoin mining margins compress is a question probably only Michel himself can answer. What the record shows clearly is the outcome: a digital-asset infrastructure business evolving into an energy-backed AI compute platform, led by an executive whose career began far from the data hall.
