The Southeast Asian country of Laos has announced that it plans to cut off its electricity supply to cryptocurrency miners in early 2026.
As Reuters reported, Laos is a major energy exporter for the region, producing a huge quantity of hydroelectric power that it cannot use domestically.
It is a major part of the surrounding nations' planned transition to cleaner energy, although deals are still being negotiated with some of its neighbors.
However, thanks to policy changes in 2021, the country also became an attractive target for cryptocurrency miners. A source of cheap and plentiful energy makes crypto mining more profitable, so when the country began to overproduce power and made it available to these companies, they leapt at the chance.
Using renewable hydroelectric energy solves one of the major problems with crypto mining: its energy-intensive operations generate significant air pollution when powered by dirty fuels.
Also, in this case, with such a surplus of energy, it is unlikely that the crypto company's presence will significantly drive up prices for other utility customers.
However, that still leaves other problems — like the overuse of water to cool down overheating computers, or the incredible noise that can overwhelm neighbors.
That being the case, it is unsurprising that Laos would prefer to put its energy to better uses.
"Crypto doesn't create value compared to supplying it to industrial or commercial consumers," deputy energy minister Chanthaboun Soukaloun told Reuters. "We proposed to the government in 2021 to supply to crypto mining due to the oversupply of electricity domestically."
Now there are better applications for the extra power, including metals refining, electric vehicles, and AI.
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Laos has already begun to scale back its supply to crypto companies. According to Soukaloun, "I think by the end of the first quarter of 2026, we might stop [supply to crypto] entirely."
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