• USD 3.2 cents/ kWh
  • The cost of electricity for bitcoin miners in Ethiopia as per 2024 will reach USD 3.6/ kWh cents after taxes. This is significantly less than the average price in other markets, making the cost of production for 1 bitcoin less than USD 10,000.
• USD 5.71/ day
  • The profit generated by one bitcoin miner (Device: Bitmain AntMiner S19 XP - 140 Th). According to the NiceHash profitability calculator, the income of one server will yield USD 8.02 in revenue with USD 2.31 of electricity costs for a profit of USD 5.71.
• 600 megawatts
  • The amount of energy in Ethiopia currently being dedicated to secure the Bitcoin network, according to Ato Hiwot Eshetu, Director at the Ethiopia Electric Power (EEP). This demand is expected to grow to 1.5 gigawatt in the short term.
• 1.5 years
  • The return on investment (ROI) for a bitcoin mining project in Ethiopia. At present 27 companies have registered and 10 are operational. These operational facilities include West Data Group, BitCluster/ BWP, QRB Labs and others.
• USD 55 million
  • The amount of revenue achieved by Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) from the sale of electricity to bitcoin miners in the past 10 months. In the next year, EEP expects to earn at least USD 123 million as more bitcoin miners come online.

Bitcoin mining has been approved by the Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) and Ministry of Trade for business licenses under the category of “cryptocurrency mining”. Since 2023 more than 25 companies have been approved to do business in Ethiopia. Roughly 11 are operational having collectively imported 200,000 hardware devices and today using more than 600 megawatts of energy across the country. Ethan Vera, Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Luxor Tech, estimates that within a few months the bitcoin mining industry in Ethiopia will be using 1 gigawatt of energy from Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP).

These bitcoin miners are setting up facilities adjacent to substations and utilizing power purchase agreements at 10 to 50 MW for small and medium sized investments, with two facilities currently buying 120 MW (Bitmain, Kilinto) and 150 MW (Canaan, Hawassa) respectively. The vast majority of the owners, operators, and hardware suppliers today are Chinese. With an increasing amount of investment interest has been seen from China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Belgium, the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Venezuela and Paraguay.

2.5% of the global bitcoin mining network is now being secured in Ethiopia.