Ethiopian Electric Power Earned $475.5 Million in Foreign Currency This Fiscal Year, Data Centers the Largest Source

Ethiopian Electric Power earned $335.5 million from selling electricity to technology and data processing centers in the 2018 Ethiopian Fiscal Year, which closed July 7. It earned a further $140 million from power sold to Kenya, Djibouti and Sudan. Combined, the two categories put EEP's foreign currency earnings for the year at $475.5 million, 5 percent above the company's target and 41 percent higher than the year before.

Data centers were a marginal business two fiscal years ago. EEP collected $25 million from electricity sales to data mining firms in the 2023/24 fiscal year, when nine of 24 licensed companies were active and most customers still paid in birr. The following year, data mining revenue reached $220 million, overtaking cross-border exports as EEP's largest single source of foreign currency for the first time. This year's $335.5 million continues that pattern.

EEP introduced a new billing structure for data-mining customers on December 1, 2025, charging by time of use and by guaranteed power availability rather than a flat rate. At the time, 25 mining firms were seeking supply agreements with EEP, including a $250 million facility built by the Russian company BitCluster on the outskirts of Addis Ababa.

Exports followed a steadier line. Ethiopia sold $118.1 million of power to Kenya, Djibouti and Sudan in the 2024/25 fiscal year, with Kenya alone accounting for $86.3 million, about three-quarters of the total. This year's $140 million export figure is a smaller percentage gain than data-center sales posted over the same period, continuing a shift in EEP's revenue mix away from its original cross-border business.

Both revenue lines draw on the same expanding supply. EEP's installed generation capacity has more than doubled over seven years, from 4,462 megawatts to 9,752 megawatts, while the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam supplied roughly a third of total output in the most recently reported full year. The company's transmission grid, which carries power from hydro stations on the Blue Nile to both domestic substations and the border crossings used for export, now runs more than 21,000 kilometres.

In August 2025, EEP said it planned to gradually phase out cryptocurrency mining contracts, citing a government-commissioned energy outlook that projected crypto mining would consume a third of the country's power output within the year. No new contracts were to be signed, and existing ones were to be reconsidered. A year later, sales to that same customer category make up 71 percent of EEP's foreign currency earnings, more than exports to all three of its regional buyers combined. Whether the phase-out plan and the revenue figures move in the same direction from here has not been addressed by EEP.