Bitcoin’s network hashrate crossed 1 exahash per second for the first time in early 2026, a milestone that got less attention than it deserved. The number itself is striking, but more interesting is where that compute is now located.
After China’s 2021 mining ban displaced an estimated 50% of global hashrate almost overnight, the obvious concern was whether mining would simply reconcentrate elsewhere - swapping one dominant jurisdiction for another. For a while, the United States absorbed most of the displaced capacity, and states like Texas and Kentucky became the default answer to where Bitcoin gets mined. That concentration has since fractured.
Ethiopia, Paraguay, the UAE, and parts of Central Asia have all grown meaningfully as mining destinations over the past two years. Ethiopia in particular has leaned into its hydroelectric surplus, with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam providing cheap power that large-scale miners have moved to exploit. Paraguay’s Itaipu Dam access has attracted similar interest. These aren’t marginal operations - some of the facilities being built in these locations are industrial scale.
What Dispersion Actually Means for the Network
A more geographically spread hashrate makes a coordinated regulatory attack on Bitcoin’s proof-of-work harder to execute. No single government controls enough of the network to threaten its operation unilaterally. That’s a qualitative change from 2020, when a single regulatory decision in Beijing could - and did - cause months of hashrate volatility and upward block time drift.
It also changes how mining economics respond to price cycles. When capacity is concentrated, a price crash creates localized distress that spreads fast. Dispersed operations running on different energy contracts, currencies, and cost bases don’t move in lockstep the same way.
The Caveat
None of this means mining is evenly distributed or that regulatory risk has disappeared. The U.S. still accounts for a plurality of hashrate by most estimates, and political pressure on energy-intensive industries hasn’t gone away - it’s shifted form.
The more interesting question may be whether dispersion continues accelerating or whether economics eventually push miners back toward a handful of low-cost hubs. Cheap, stranded energy is finite, and the next wave of mining hardware will be even more power-hungry. Whether small or mid-tier energy markets can absorb that demand without repricing it away is genuinely unclear.