The dam, the miners, and the question of who electricity is for

On 9 September 2025, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed cut the ribbon on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Seventeen years in the making, financed almost entirely by Ethiopian bondholders and citizens buying pieces of the project they could barely afford, the GERD is now Africa’s largest hydroelectric facility. Installed capacity: 5,150 megawatts. Projected annual generation: roughly 15,700 gigawatt-hours. More electricity than Ethiopia’s current grid can even distribute.

And inside warehouses scattered across the country, servers are already humming, converting some of that electricity into Bitcoin.

Ethiopia is now the 8th largest Bitcoin mining country in the world, responsible for around 2.7 per cent of the global network. In 2024, the state-owned Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) generated $55 million from Bitcoin miners in ten months. In 2026, EEP is projected to earn around $350 million from mining operations, roughly 18 per cent of the utility’s total revenue. Twenty-five mining companies are operational. Another twenty are waiting for permits that were frozen in August 2025 because the grid could not absorb the demand.

For anyone paying attention to the political economy of the African continent, this is an extraordinary moment. It is also a test.

Ethiopia is doing what most African resource economies have never done. It is refusing to sell its natural endowment cheaply to foreigners who then capture all the upside

The bull case is genuinely Pan-African. Ethiopia is doing what most African resource economies have never done. It is refusing to sell its natural endowment cheaply to foreigners who then capture all the upside. In January 2026, speaking at the Finance Forward Ethiopia conference, Abiy announced that state-owned Ethiopian Investment Holdings would take direct equity stakes in national Bitcoin mining operations, reportedly between 20 and 30 percent of the mega-facilities being established in the country. The logic is straightforward. If the rivers are ours, if the dam was built with our money, if the electricity is ours, then the digital gold being mined from that electricity must also, substantially, be ours.

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: Photo credit. Prime Minister Office Ethiopia. Public Domain/ commons.wikimedia

This is a sharp break from the extraction model that has defined African mineral economies for a century. The cobalt in a Congolese child’s hands becomes a Tesla battery whose profits accrue in California. The coltan pulled from Eastern Congo enriches shareholders in Taipei. Ethiopian Bitcoin, by contrast, is being mined inside a framework where the Ethiopian state captures the utility revenue, the state investment holding captures equity, and the country earns hard currency at roughly 3.2 US cents per kilowatt-hour, some of the cheapest power in the world. The Chinese miners who relocated after Beijing’s 2021 ban did not come to Ethiopia because they love Ethiopians. They came because the economics work. Ethiopia, for once, is the country where the economics work for the country.

But now the honest part. Approximately 55 per cent of Ethiopians still have no access to electricity. Let that sit.

Africa’s largest dam is powering Bitcoin rigs while more than half of the country it belongs to cannot switch on a light bulb. Ethiopian Electric Power’s director of marketing has publicly called it “stranded power” that would otherwise go to waste because the grid to transmit it simply does not exist yet. That explanation is technically true. It is also politically insufficient. Stranded power is a description of infrastructure failure, not an argument for why miners deserve it before citizens. The question for Utu/Ubuntu practitioners is not whether Bitcoin mining is compatible with community well-being in the abstract. It is whether the revenue generated from miners is being ploughed, urgently and transparently, into the transmission infrastructure that will bring electricity to the 55 per cent. That is the test. That is the only test.

The question for Utu/Ubuntu practitioners is not whether Bitcoin mining is compatible with community well-being in the abstract. It is whether the revenue generated from miners is being ploughed, urgently and transparently

There is a version of this story where Ethiopia becomes the first African country to convert its natural resources into monetary sovereignty while simultaneously electrifying its own people, using one to fund the other. And there is a version where the 55 per cent wait another decade while warehouses of imported rigs hum profitably on the Nile. Both futures are live. Both depend on the choices Ethiopian policymakers are making now, and on whether Ethiopian civil society holds them accountable.

We should be watching closely. Because if Ethiopia gets this right, the template is portable. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s hydro potential is roughly 100,000 megawatts. Kenya’s geothermal, Namibia’s solar, Mozambique’s gas. Every African country with stranded renewable energy is sitting on a potential sovereignty asset. The question is whether we have learned enough, finally, to mine the asset for ourselves. 

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