This 22-year-old survives Lebanon with a bitcoin mining business that’s been earning $20,000 a month
Ahmad Abu Daher repairing mining equipment in the basement of a home in Zaarouriyeh.
Ahmad Abu Daher
It takes a lot to keep a grassroots cryptocurrency mining business up and running in Lebanon. Ahmad Abu Daher says he and his team of more than 40 Lebanese and Syrian employees are working around the clock to man thousands of machines across the country.
“We can’t sleep. We can’t have any break,” the 22-year-old Abu Daher told CNBC at 2:36 A.M. Lebanon time. “All of my team are still awake. They don’t sleep. Our shift is working 16 hours per day, and sometimes, up to 18 or 19 hours.”
Abu Daher’s voice competes with the sound of machines whirring in the background, each crunching thousands of complicated math equations to produce a mix of crypto tokens – now a vital source of income in a country where money has stopped making sense.
Lebanon once boasted a thriving and resilient banking sector that attracted the world’s elite. But after decades of war, bad spending decisions by the government, and financial policies that the World Bank has compared to a Ponzi scheme, the country’s economy is in ruin.
Mining equipment at one of Ahmad Abu Daher’s crypto farms in Lebanon.
Ahmad Abu Daher
The local currency has lost more than 95% of its value since 2019, the minimum wage has plunged to $17 a month, pensions are virtually worthless, and bank account balances are just numbers on paper. Banks close without warning and ATMs are often either out of cash or entirely offline from nationwide blackouts. When locals are able to gain access to their accounts, many tell CNBC that they have grown accustomed to withdrawing money at 15% of its original worth.
Against this backdrop, Abu Daher jumped into the crypto mining business a little over two years ago. He and a friend began with three machines running on hydroelectric power in Zaarouriyeh, a town 30 miles south of Beirut in the Chouf Mountains.
“When we started, it was our great idea to make money while sleeping or eating,” said Abu Daher. Nowadays, Abu Daher says he is online 20 hours a day.
An architect by training, Abu Daher saw several other university students unable to find work after graduation, so he realized he had to be proactive, teaching himself various technical tasks by watching YouTube videos.
Ahmad Abu Daher repairing mining equipment in the basement of a home in Zaarouriyeh.
Ahmad Abu Daher
It has been 26 months since Abu Daher first set up shop, and he says that business is thriving.
He now has about 400 crypto farms with between 5 and 100 machines each, in 42 villages across the country running on a mix of hydropower, solar power, and fuel. Abu Daher says that he pulls in about $20,000 a month, and typically, half of those proceeds come from mining and the other half from selling machines and trading in crypto.
When CNBC asked for crypto exchange statements and copies of bank balances to corroborate the estimate, Abu Daher said that the figure was pieced together from trading, mining, and selling machines, in a mix of transactions involving cash, checks, and tether, as well as multiple crypto wallets.
Abu Daher certainly has the trappings of a mining baron.
“When Ahmad pulled up in a white Range Rover to greet us and take us for a tour of the town, I was kind of impressed,” said Mohamad El Chamaa, a journalist at L’Orient Today who previously reported on Abu Daher’s crypto mines. “I had known him before Covid when he was a college student at the architecture department and I was his TA. It looked like the crypto business was treating him well.”
Building a bitcoin mining business
Abu Daher had a few black swan events on his side soon after he broke into crypto mining.
In May 2021, China expelled crypto miners, flooding the market with cheap, used mining rigs and reducing competition. This happened as cryptocurrency prices climbed toward all-time record highs.
As geopolitics permanently reshaped the landscape of the crypto mining industry, Abu Daher and his team began to build out their own farms across Lebanon with rigs acquired at fire sale prices from miners in China. Paying for those machines was not always straightforward.
“Due to sanctions controls, difficulty with using cash, and specifically in Lebanon, the banking system and the inability to use dollars or wire money, USD tether is essentially a key intermediary currency between people in the Chinese hardware market to Lebanese purchasers,” said Nicholas Shafer, a University of Oxford academic studying Lebanon’s crypto mining industry.
Detailed administrative and political vector map of Lebanon.
Getty Images
Abu Daher’s farms span the country, with roughly half of his equipment in the hydro-rich Chouf range, and the remaining 50% scattered throughout Lebanon, including in the Beqaa Valley, which is close to the Syrian border, and offers solar power as an alternative electricity source. (Though, as Shafer notes, the problem with solar is capacity — solar typically does not produce enough megawatts to mine at scale.)
Abu Daher also started to host rigs for people living across Lebanon, who needed stable money but lacked technical expertise and access to cheap and steady electricity, as the nation often experiences blackouts.
The mining boss does appear to be sharing those profits with his team. Shafer, who conducted field research at some of Abu Daher’s mining sites, says that of Abu Daher’s 40 employees, all receive a formal salary ranging from $800 to $4,000 per month in U.S. dollars or in tether. The blacksmith, who makes the least of any of Abu Daher’s staff, earns more than 26 times the minimum wage in Lebanon, according to Shafer.
Abu Daher mines for a mix of cryptocurrencies, including litecoin, dogecoin, bitcoin, and ethereum classic — and in some cases, he has programmed the machines to switch to mine whichever is the most profitable coin that day. He uses software called TeamViewer to remotely monitor and keep track of all this hardware.
“Each machine can mine many coins, and each coin has their specific equations,” explained Abu Daher. “Maybe today the best coin to mine is bitcoin, tomorrow it’s litecoin, and the day after that, it’s ethereum. We are always moving to have the most profit that we can.”
Around two-thirds of his customers are Lebanese, including some mining for bitcoin, dogecoin, or litecoin as a way to get spending money for daily expenses like fuel and food. One-quarter are Syrian, and the remaining 8% are a mix of people living in Egypt, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom.
With some of his clients, Abu Daher is merely a custodian of the machines — housing them, cooling them, and providing steady electrical power and strong internet access. He charges a fee and in exchange, he gives them a cut of the mining proceeds in crypto. Others just ask him to broker the equipment sale and install it.
Ahmad Abu Daher and his friend began mining ether with three machines running on hydroelectric power in Zaarouriyeh, a town 30 miles south of Beirut in the Chouf Mountains. Abu Daher has since scaled his business to thousands of machines spread across Lebanon.
Ahmad Abu Daher
Unlike the massive mining farms of Texas that stack hundreds of thousands of machines into buildings the size of multiple football stadiums, Abu Daher prefers to spread out his electrical footprint, divvying up his thousands of miners in places like stores, basements, and apartments, each with 10 to 20 machines, unless it’s a house where he can split up groupings of miners into different rooms. In exchange for the space, Abu Daher pays rent in cash. In what was once a barbershop, for instance, Abu Daher runs 15 ASICs.
“At first glance, the town does not look like much of what you would think a ‘mining’ town would look like, but then you look inside the storefronts that are replacing traditional businesses, and you get a better feeling. For example, one of Ahmad’s farms used to be a barbershop – there’s still a mirror inside and ads for beauty products – but make no mistake that it is a fully fledged mining farm,” said El Chamaa of some of the mines in the Chouf range.
He added that, “The mining farms themselves were not as impressive as the ones I’ve seen on TikTok, but my keen observation was that they get the job done either way.”
Now, Abu Daher is trying to educate the locals about mining, mainly because he needs the extra manpower to keep the business going.
“We are trying to let someone in each village learn about mining in the purpose to help us. We can’t cover all the machines we have by my team, because we have a huge amount of machines, and we are selling a huge amount of machines,” he said.
AntMiner L3++ miners running at one of Ahmad Abu Daher’s crypto farms in Mghayriyeh in the Chouf Mountains.
Ahmad Abu Daher
Lifeline to ‘fresh dollars’
In Oct. 2019, money stopped making sense in Lebanon. After a season of unrest triggered by an ill-fated taxation scheme and years of economic mismanagement, banks first limited withdrawals and then shut their doors entirely as much of the world descended into Covid lockdowns.
Hyperinflation took root. The local currency, which had a peg of 1,500 Lebanese pounds to $1 for 25 years, began to rapidly depreciate. The street rate is now around 40,000 pounds to $1. After re-opening, the banks refused to keep up with this extreme depreciation, and offered much lower exchange rates for U.S. dollars than they were worth on the open market.
Anti-government protesters take part in a demonstration against the political elites and the government, in Beirut, Lebanon, on August 8, 2020 after the massive explosion at the Port of Beirut.
STR | NurPhoto via Getty Images
Today, withdrawals of U.S. dollars deposited into the Lebanese banking system before 2019 are capped, and each so-called “lollar” is paid out at a rate worth about 15% of its actual value, according to estimates from multiple locals and experts living across Lebanon.
Meanwhile, banks still offer the full market-rate exchange rate for U.S. dollars deposited after 2019. These are now known colloquially as “fresh dollars.”
Cryptocurrencies are volatile — the price of bitcoin has dropped about 70% from its peak a year ago — but the power of earning fresh dollars is a massive incentive for Lebanese to enter mining.
Rawad El Hajj, a 27-year-old with a marketing degree, tells CNBC that his 11 machines mine for litecoin and dogecoin.
Rawad El Hajj
Rawad El Hajj, a 27-year-old with a marketing degree, found out about Abu Daher’s mining operation three years ago through his brother.
“We started because there is not enough work in Lebanon,” El Hajj said.
El Hajj, who lives south of the capital in a city called Barja, started small, purchasing two miners to start.
“Then every month, we started to go bigger and bigger,” he said.
Because of the distance to Abu Daher’s farms, El Hajj pays to outsource the work of hosting and maintaining the rigs. He tells CNBC that his 11 machines mine for litecoin and dogecoin, which collectively bring in the equivalent of about .02 bitcoin a month, or $360.
It’s a similar story for Salah Al Zaatare, an architect living 20 minutes south of El Hajj in the coastal city of Sidon. Al Zaatare tells CNBC that he began mining dogecoin and litecoin in March of this year to augment his income. He now has 10 machines that he keeps with Abu Daher. Al Zaatare’s machines are newer models so he pulls in more than El Hajj — about $7,200 a month.
“I got into it because I think it will become a good investment for the future,” Al Zaatare told CNBC.
Al Zaatare pulled all of his money out of the bank before the crisis hit in 2019, and he held onto that cash until deciding to invest his life savings into mining equipment last year.
“I don’t have any problem now living in Lebanon since I am getting fresh dollars from mining,” said Myriam Harfoush, a 32-year-old French teacher living in Baakleen — about a 45-minute drive south of Beirut.
Harfoush, who trades in crypto on the side, told CNBC in a WhatsApp message that she took all of her money out of the bank at the start of the crisis and now has mining machines in Zaarouriyeh. (Harfoush only spoke to CNBC in written messages on WhatsApp, citing concerns over speaking by phone.)
“If you can get the machine, and you get the power, you get the money,” said Shafer. “Crypto is something that with the right type of expertise, you can produce in your local context.”
Overhead power lines transmit hydroelectricity to the surrounding towns.
Mohamad El Chamaa
The energy dilemma
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, dogecoin, and litecoin are created through a process known as proof-of-work, in which miners around the world run high-powered computers that collectively validate transactions and simultaneously create new tokens. The process requires a lot of electricity, and because this is the only variable cost in a low-margin industry, miners tend to seek out the cheapest sources of power.
More often than not, renewables offer the most competitive pricing on electricity.
“It’s a way to convert a locally stranded resource (electricity) into a global commodity,” explained Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures, which focuses on blockchain investments. “Hydro, especially run on the river, is one of those classic resources which tends to have a supply-demand mismatch.”
Dammed hydro can better accommodate fluctuations in demand and grid needs, whereas run-of-the-river hydro produces constantly, Carter tells CNBC.
Helium machine mounted on top of a house in Lebanon.
Mohamad El Chamaa
“So you often see these stranded or underutilized hydro resources being monetized part of the time with bitcoin mining, as we saw infamously in Sichuan and Yunnan in China,” continued Carter.
Abu Daher taps into a hydropower project which harnesses electricity from the 90-mile Litani River that cuts across southern Lebanon. He says he is getting 20 hours a day of electricity at old pre-inflationary rates.
“So basically, we are paying very cheap electricity, and we are getting fresh dollars through mining,” continued Abu Daher.
But the government, facing electrical shortages, is starting to crack down.
In January, police raided a small crypto mining farm in the hydro-powered town of Jezzine, seizing and dismantling mining rigs in the process. Soon after, the Litani River Authority, which oversees the country’s hydroelectric sites, reportedly said that “energy intensive cryptomining” was “straining its resources and draining electricity.”
But Abu Daher tells CNBC he is neither worried about being raided — nor the government’s proposal to hike up the price of electricity.
“We had some meetings with the police, and we don’t have any problems with them, because we are taking legal electricity, and we are not affecting the infrastructure,” he said.
Whereas Abu Daher says that he has set up a meter that officially tracks how much energy his machines have consumed, other miners have allegedly hitched their rigs to the grid illegally and are not paying for power.
Electricity harnessed from the Litani River transmits electricity to the Charles Helou power station, which provides enough electricity to power the mining farms in the area.
Mohamad El Chamaa
“Basically, a lot of other persons are having some issues, because they are not paying for electricity, and they are affecting the infrastructure,” he said.
Abu Daher, who has a knack for building creative designs to solve real-world problems, says that his next goal is creating a closed energy loop for his mining farms. He envisions a system in which the heat produced by the machines is harnessed and that geothermal energy is repurposed to power the miners, as well as to heat homes and hospitals in the villages where these mines are located.
“Instead of buying fuel to heat up our homes, we would buy mining machines. We produce heat to heat up our building, and at the same time, we produce money,” Abu Daher explained of his grand vision for the future of crypto mining in Lebanon.
Ahmad Abu Daher repairing mining equipment in the basement of a home in Zaarouriyeh.
Ahmad Abu Daher
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Read the full Bloomberg story here.
— CNBC’s Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.
WATCH: Gemini delivering well for Google, says Check Capital’s Chris Ballard
CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days at an Amazon fulfillment center on December 2, 2024 in Orlando, Florida.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images
For 10 years, Aaron Cordovez has been selling kitchen appliances on Amazon. Now he’s in a bind, because most of his products are manufactured in China.
Cordovez, co-founder of Zulay Kitchen, said his company is moving “as fast as we can” to move production to India, Mexico and other markets, where tariffs are increasing under President Donald Trump, but are mild compared with the levies imposed on goods from China. That process will likely take at least a year or two to complete, he said.
“We’re making our inventory last as long as we can,” Cordovez said in an email.
Zulay is also temporarily raising the price of some of its milk frothers, smores roasting sticks and other products. The company’s popular kitchen strainer now costs $12.99, up from $9.99 before Trump announced his sweeping tariff proposal earlier this month.
Amazon merchants are hiking prices for everything from diaper bags and refrigerator magnets to charm necklaces and other top-selling items as they confront higher import costs. E-commerce software company SmartScout tracked 930 products on Amazon that have seen increased prices since April 9, with an average jump of 29%.
The price hikes affect a range of categories, including clothing, jewelry, household items, office supplies, electronics and toys.
The trade war with China has threatened to upend sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, which accounts for about 60% of the company’s online sales. Many merchants are based in China or rely on the world’s second-largest economy to source and assemble their products.
Sellers are now faced with the conundrum of raising prices or eating the extra costs associated with Trump’s new tariffs. It’s an existential threat for many sellers, who subsist on razor-thin margins and have, for the last several years, dealt with rising costs on Amazon tied to storage, fulfillment, shipping and advertising fees along with pricing pressure from increased competition.
CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC earlier this month that the company was “going to try and do everything we can” to keep prices low for shoppers, including renegotiating terms with some of its suppliers. But he acknowledged some third-party sellers will “need to pass that cost” of tariffs on to consumers.
Amazon’s stock price is down 15% so far this year, sliding along with the broader market. The company reports first-quarter earnings next week.
Goods imported from China now face import duties of 145%, though Trump said Wednesday his administration is “actively” talking with China about a potential deal to lower tariffs. Chinese officials on Thursday denied that trade talks are taking place.
About 25% of the price increases observed by SmartScout were initiated by sellers based in China, said Scott Needham, the company’s CEO. Last week, stainless steel jewelry maker Ursteel hiked prices on four of its products by $6.50, while apparel brand Chouyatou raised the price of some of its dresses by $2. Both businesses are based in China’s Zhejiang province.
Anker, a Chinese electronics brand and one of Amazon’s largest sellers, has raised prices on one-fifth of its products sold in the U.S., including a portable power bank, which went up to $135 from $110, SmartScout data shows.
Representatives from Anker, Ursteel and Chouyatou didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Zulay, headquartered in Florida, is one of many U.S.-based sellers raising prices. The company is also cutting costs. Cordovez said he’s been forced to lay off 19% of his workforce and slash online ad spending by 85%.
Desert Cactus, based in Illinois, is also taking action. Joe Stefani, the company’s president, has been looking to move production of some of his brand’s college-themed merchandise out of China and into Mexico, India and Vietnam. About half of Desert Cactus’ goods come from China, while the rest are made in the U.S., Stefani said.
An Amazon worker moves a cart filled with packages at an Amazon delivery station in Alpharetta, Georgia, on Nov. 28, 2022.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
One of the company’s top products is a customizable license plate frame that’s manufactured in China. At the start of Trump’s first term in 2016, Stefani’s company paid import and shipping fees of 4% on the license plates. That rate has since skyrocketed to 170%, he said.
“The tariffs can’t stay this high,” Stefani said. “There’s so many people that just aren’t going to make it.”
Stefani said he expects Desert Cactus will end up raising prices on some products, though he’s worried shoppers might be put off by sticker shock.
“Will someone be willing to pay $50 for a hat on Amazon?” Stefani said. “You know it’s going to be expensive at the ballpark, but on Amazon we don’t know.”
Dave Dama, co-founder of health and beauty business Pure Daily Care, said the price to manufacture one of his skin-care products in China jumped to $25 from $10. Most Amazon sellers will have no choice but to raise prices, he said.
“If you were selling something for $40 and making a $7 or $8 profit at the end of the day, with these tariffs, those days are gone,” Dama said. “You can’t do that anymore. It’s unsustainable.”
Pure Daily Care plans to stagger price increases over several weeks, and only on products “we absolutely need to,” to keep Amazon’s algorithms from ranking it lower in search results or losing the valuable buy box, he said. The buy box determines which listing pops up first when a shopper clicks on a particular product, and the one that gets purchased when they tap “Add to Cart.”
An Amazon spokesperson said the company’s pricing policies continue to apply.
“As always, sellers set their own prices, and we regularly monitor how we highlight great prices as Featured Offers to provide customers with low prices across a wide selection,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Dama said his company has enough inventory for some products to last up to six months, which it aims to “stretch as long as possible” in the hope that China and the U.S. can reach a trade deal. The company is also forgoing some sales promotions and discounts, while pausing spend on some display and video ads.
Regarding his inventory, Dama said, “We can try to stretch that seven, eight, nine months, which buys us a lot more time for this thing to work out, hopefully.”
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