Paraguay Puts a Date on It: Miners Out by Dec. 31, 2027, AI In for 15 Years

Paraguay's state utility just put a date on the end of an era. ANDE says the power contracts serving roughly 4% of the world's bitcoin mining capacity, priced at $44 a megawatt-hour, expire on Dec. 31, 2027. That's not a soft target. The utility calls the date final.

Here's what it signed instead. A 15-year power agreement with an AI data campus backed by Founders Fund. Fifteen years, against three years and change of runway left for the miners. That single comparison tells you everything about how this ends.

Run the arithmetic. A miner at $44 a megawatt-hour carries a cost basis that only works while hashprice cooperates, and hashprice hasn't cooperated much since the April 2024 halving. Operations running older fleets are already underwater at that power price. The ones with new machines are fine, right up until they aren't.

An AI campus plays a different game entirely. Its revenue comes from multi-year compute contracts, the kind customers sign before the racks are even powered. That lets a developer bid $60 or $70 a megawatt-hour, absorb the premium, and still clear its return targets. And they'll bid it. Paraguay sits on Itaipú hydro, some of the cheapest electrons in the hemisphere.

Professional traders are pricing in exactly this substitution across Latin America. Power is getting repriced against GPU revenue instead of hash revenue, and there's only one winner in that auction.

The losers are easy to identify. That 4% slice works out to roughly 30 to 40 exahashes per second on a given day, and it needs a new home by the end of 2027. Texas is full. Ethiopia is cheap but crowded. The UAE wants the hashrate and has the capital to chase it. Expect the exit to look gradual for a year, then sudden, with hashrate drifting toward whoever signs the longest contract.

Here's my take. Miners spent years treating cheap stranded hydro as a permanent edge. It wasn't. It was a lease on someone else's dam, renewable at the landlord's discretion, and the landlord just found a tenant with deeper pockets and better credit.

Effectively betting on compute and against hashing is the trade Paraguay just made, and I'd make it too. Watch the back half of 2026 for the first wave of equipment relocations, because nobody waits until December 2027 to start moving rigs.