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• The EBRD is providing a loan of EGP 350 million to Ridgewood for Water Desalination, a Hassan Allam Utilities company, in Egypt
• Financing will support construction of new desalination plants and upgrades to existing facilities along the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts
• Investment to strengthen water security, boost efficiency and support key tourism and industry sectors

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is extending a senior loan of up to EGP 350 million (€6.4 million) to Ridgewood for Water Desalination (RWD), a Hassan Allam Utilities company, to support Egypt’s water security goals through sustainable infrastructure development.

The financing to RWD will fund the construction of new small-scale desalination plants and upgrade of existing facilities along Egypt’s Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts.

These new facilities will help RWD to deliver a reliable water supply to key sectors of Egypt’s economy, such as tourism and industry, which currently lack access to municipal water owing to the country’s regulatory regime. The investment will also improve operational and energy efficiency, while supporting the company’s growth and diversification.

Egypt faces significant water scarcity, namely an annual deficit of around 7 billion cubic metres, with the Nile River accounting for 97 per cent of its freshwater resources. Population growth, climate change and regional pressures have intensified the need for a sustainable water supply.

Expanding desalination capacity, through public-private partnerships and private investment, will help to meet this need and enable the use of renewable energy, ensuring resilience and sustainability.

The upgraded central water stations and new standalone plants are expected to add a desalination capacity of approximately 10,000 to 15,000 cubic metres a day.

Ridgewood for Water Desalination is an Egypt-based company, incorporated in 1999, that provides desalinated water to private-sector clients in the coastal areas of Egypt.

Egypt is a founding member of the EBRD. Since the start of the Bank’s operations in the country in 2012, the EBRD has invested almost €13.9 billion in 209 projects across the economy.

NVIDIA has confirmed at CES 2026 that its next-generation Rubin AI computing platform is already in full production. This announcement has prompted a decisive, almost panicked shift among Bitcoin mining firms toward AI data-center infrastructure services. This movement marks more than just a structural change in the economic model for miners; it is a high-stakes survival pivot as escalating AI compute demand radically alters competitive dynamics.

According to NVIDIA executives speaking in Las Vegas, the Rubin platform integrates advanced GPUs and CPUs designed for the most demanding next-generation AI workloads, delivering roughly five times the performance of previous systems while operating with greater efficiency. NVIDIA’s roadmap positions Rubin systems for broad deployment through cloud partners later in 2026, enabling customers to construct large-scale AI clusters by linking servers into pods containing more than 1,000 chips.

Institutional partners including major cloud providers and AI service companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, and CoreWeave are expected to be early adopters, signaling absolute confidence in Rubin’s market readiness.

While the business logic for miners to switch to AI seems sound, the operational reality is brutal. The article’s previous suggestion that miners must simply “reallocate hardware capacity” drastically understates the technical challenge.

A typical Bitcoin mining facility is often little more than a ventilated warehouse, designed for interruptible power and low redundancy (Tier 0 or Tier 1 data center standards). If power fails, ASICs simply reboot and resume hashing.

An AI training cluster built on Rubin architecture requires hospital-grade reliability: Tier 3 or Tier 4 standards guaranteeing 99.999% uptime. A single power flicker during a weeks-long LLM training run can ruin the entire process, costing millions.

The financial implications of this transition are severe. Reports indicate that equipping a 100-megawatt data-center site with advanced Rubin GPUs requires billions in capital expenditure.

For Bitcoin miners, usually capital-constrained and reliant on volatile crypto markets, securing this financing is a “bet-the-company” moment. They are no longer just competing for hash rate; they are competing for expensive capital against tech giants.

To fund the required NVIDIA hardware deposits and infrastructure overhauls, many miners face difficult choices: accepting significant shareholder dilution through equity offerings, taking on substantial high-interest debt loads, or liquidating their Bitcoin treasuries, potentially at suboptimal market timing. They are front-loading massive CAPEX risk before enterprise AI contracts are even secured.

Large publicly traded mining companies like Marathon Holdings and Bitdeer are attempting this strategic repositioning, exploring partnerships or total facility conversions. Firms like BitFuFu are trying to leverage existing infrastructure to attract enterprise clients requiring rack space.

However, the infrastructure chasm will likely decimate smaller miners or operations lacking long-term, stable power contracts and deep data-center expertise. As resource constraints tighten under the pressure of AI demand, these firms face forced consolidation or market exit.