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Gridless 소개
Gridless places compute beside renewable power plants in Africa, operating in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia. The starting point is a supply-demand mismatch: a plant needs a steady customer while local electricity demand grows slowly, which leaves good hydro, solar and geothermal projects struggling to line up matching construction capital, so Gridless supplies a customer that can arrive quickly, absorb unused power and curtail when the community needs more.
Inside a site, power follows a priority order: community homes and businesses come first, AI compute takes the firm block, and bitcoin miners buy the variable remainder. Two node types cover different conditions: the Edge AI Node relies on firm renewable power and fibre for inference and local data hosting, keeps data in-country and uses sealed liquid cooling, while the Offnet node suits locations with weaker power and connectivity. The project frames the idea as moving computers to megawatts rather than moving power to computers.
Through 2025 and 2026 Gridless ran seven mining sites in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, placing bitcoin mining containers beside run-of-river hydro plants as a buyer of last resort for surplus power. In Murang'a County, Kenya, community electricity prices fell from $10 to $4 a month and one site's tariff dropped from 35 to 25 cents per kWh; at the Zengamina plant in Zambia, mining revenue let the operator connect about 2,000 more people and 40 businesses within a year; the company says it has powered roughly 5,000 households in Kenya, 1,800 in Malawi and 1,200 in Zambia.
In 2026 a Rockefeller Foundation-linked effort launched the Emergent Grid pilot to test whether AI compute can replace bitcoin mining as the anchor buyer on African mini-grids, citing Gridless's four years of operating data; the company runs its own Gridless OS for second-by-second demand response and has open-sourced its Kifaru container blueprints.
Gridless co-founder Janet Maingi says the company is raising tens of millions of dollars to build its own run-of-river hydro plants, shifting from depending on existing plants to developing generation, and to replicate the mini-grid plus compute model as a founding member of the Green Africa Mining Alliance.
에릭 허스먼 (공동 창업자 겸 CEO): Ushahidi, iHub, BRCK 등 주목할 만한 아프리카 기술 이니셔티브를 설립한 기술 기업가. 현재 Gridless의 CEO로서 비트코인 채굴을 통해 아프리카의 농촌 전력화를 추진하고 있다. 필립 월튼 (공동 창업자): BRCK와 같은 하드웨어 및 네트워킹 프로젝트에 기여한 노련한 기술 전문가. Gridless의 공동 창업자로서 기술 방향성을 담당하고 있다. 재닛 마잉기 (공동 창업자 겸 COO): 운영 관리 배경을 가진 인물로, 이전에 Azenia의 상무이사를 역임했다. 현재 Gridless의 COO로서 일상 운영과 전략 실행을 총괄하고 있다.