Paraguay's ANDE Will Let High-Consumption Power Contracts Expire in 2027

Paraguay's state electricity utility, ANDE, says special power contracts for high-consumption users — including cryptocurrency miners — will expire on Dec. 31, 2027, without renewal under current rules. The operators covered by those agreements draw a combined 943.8 megawatts from the country's surplus hydropower.

That figure deserves a frame of reference. Nine hundred forty-three megawatts is roughly the output of a mid-sized power plant, enough electricity to supply hundreds of thousands of average households, and nearly all of it flows today to industrial users operating under preferential terms that ANDE now intends to sunset.

The announcement carries direct consequences for one listed miner in particular. Between 77% and 80% of HIVE Digital Technologies' active mining capacity sits in Paraguay, according to the company's disclosed figures. A contract structure that lapses at the end of 2027 threatens the economics of that entire footprint; HIVE has not yet said publicly how it plans to replace or renegotiate the supply arrangements, and that silence is itself material.

What changes at the end of 2027?

Under the current framework, nothing renews automatically. The special contracts terminate on Dec. 31, 2027, and ANDE has stated it does not intend to extend them under existing terms. Whether replacement agreements become available — and on what pricing — remains unstated. Miners now operate with a hard deadline and no published fallback.

For HIVE, the exposure is concentrated. If roughly four-fifths of its hashrate depends on Paraguayan hydropower, a lapse in supply terms could force relocation, curtailment or renegotiation at less favorable rates. None of those options is costless, and none has been quantified by the company in the material at hand.

Why AI data centers are the successor tenants

ANDE is not simply shedding demand. The utility is signing 15-year electricity supply agreements with artificial intelligence data centers, according to its own statements. The shift is structural rather than incidental: long-tenured, creditworthy AI compute tenants offer the revenue certainty that crypto miners — whose demand fluctuates with token prices and hardware cycles — do not.

The contrast in contract length is the telling detail. Miners held special agreements now set to expire; AI data centers are locking in supply for a decade and a half. Paraguay's surplus hydropower, long a magnet for energy-intensive mining, is being re-priced toward a buyer class with longer horizons.

What remains unresolved

Several questions stay open. ANDE has not detailed what tariff regime, if any, will replace the special contracts after 2027. It has not named the AI data center counterparties or disclosed the volumes allocated to them. And it has not clarified whether existing miners can compete for the new long-term agreements on equal terms.

For operators holding 943.8 megawatts of aggregate demand, the difference between renegotiation and eviction is the difference between a going concern and a stranded one. The burden of proof now sits with the miners to demonstrate that their Paraguayan capacity has a future beyond the expiry date.

The practical takeaway is plain: miners in Paraguay have roughly two and a half years to secure post-2027 power, and the utility's current posture suggests the queue behind them is already forming.