There’s a common assumption that Africa is too hot for Bitcoin mining. Talk to someone who actually runs a mine there, and that assumption falls apart quickly.

Freadam Eshete manages data centre operations at QB Labs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Before that, he spent years building and running Bitcoin mining facilities in Sweden, including an 8 megawatt site in the Arctic Circle that was eventually acquired by Genesis Digital Assets. He knows what it takes to run a mine in extreme cold. And now he runs one in Africa.

The climate reality is not what most people expect. Addis Ababa sits at high altitude. Average temperatures in the dry season reach around 27°C. That’s warm, but it’s manageable. You need cooling, but not heroic cooling. QB Labs solved it with modular containerised data centres fitted with water curtains. Automated pumps trigger based on ambient and hash-force temperatures. Low water use. No exotic infrastructure.

The harder problem is logistics.

Getting spare parts into Ethiopia is a bureaucratic nightmare. Warranty replacements sent for free still get taxed on arrival. Basic items like C13 power cables are hard to source locally. So QB Labs built a repair-first culture. Burnt capacitors on a power supply? Fix them in-house. Fan failure? Shuffle hashboards between machines across the same client’s fleet to hold uptime while parts are in transit.

Freadam called it Frankenstein and MacGyver. I’d call it operational excellence earned the hard way.

This is what building a Bitcoin mining industry from scratch actually looks like. Not press releases from a data centre tour. Boots on the ground, soldering irons in hand, innovating around whatever constraint shows up next.

The skills Freadam built in the Arctic Circle — managing cold shutdowns, planning for grid instability, keeping a fleet running at scale — translate directly to the African context. Different constraints, same discipline.

QB Labs is one of the operations I reference when people ask about serious Africa hosting. This conversation explains why.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHHHONC1Ta0