Bishoftu International Airport: A New Era Begins

In January, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed laid the cornerstone for a massive new Bishoftu International Airport in Abusera, then a small rural community 45 kilometers southeast of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Today, thousands of workers are transforming the area into what is expected to become one of the world’s largest aviation hubs.

The project, led by Ethiopian Airlines, is priced at $12.5 billion, up from an initial estimate of $10 billion.

At full build-out, it will have four runways, parking for 270 aircraft and capacity for 110 million passengers a year. Phase one, due to open in 2030, is sized for 60 million passengers, making Bishoftu one of the world’s top 25 busiest airports and Africa’s largest in terms of passenger volume.

The commercial case is clear: Bole International Airport, the airline’s current hub, is expected to reach its capacity ceiling within two to three years.

Bole’s congestion explains why the airport exists. The bidding lists explain why diplomats care.

Since Ethiopian Airlines published the shortlists for the main construction packages, the project has drawn interest from the United States and China, two countries with significant economic and commercial interests in African infrastructure development. Chinese state-owned enterprises and joint ventures account for roughly half of the shortlisted bidders for the civil works.

No major U.S. construction firm made the list.

Washington has responded by positioning Boeing and General Electric for the next technology and equipment contracts and by tying U.S. participation to additional Boeing aircraft orders for the carrier.

The Strategic Stakes at Bishoftu

Analysis of U.S.-China competition in Africa has focused mostly on ports, railways, telecoms, and mineral corridors. Aviation was mostly left to airlines and aircraft manufacturers, a matter of air service agreements and fleet orders. An airport on Bishoftu’s scale belongs with the ports and railways as strategic transport infrastructure, even though a commercial carrier rather than a ministry is running the procurement.

It will set the technical and security standards for what is planned as the region’s busiest hub, handle a projected 3.73 million tonnes of cargo a year, and anchor the network of an airline serving more than 145 international destinations.

Whoever supplies its air traffic management and security systems secures a position in African aviation that can last for decades through maintenance and upgrade contracts.

A greenfield site for the proposed airport in Oromia, a regional state in Ethiopia, now features in commerce department briefings in Washington and in state media coverage in Beijing for the same reason.

Unbundling the Project

Ethiopia’s answer to this attention has been to cut the project into pieces that different partners can win. The prequalification results for the four main engineering, procurement, construction and finance packages mix Chinese groups — among them the state-owned construction giant CCECC, one of the largest builders in Africa; CRBC, which built Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway and the Nairobi Expressway; and China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) — with WeBuild of Italy, Samsung C&T of South Korea, Turkish contractors including ICTAS and Kalyon, Qatar’s Urbacon and Portugal’s Mota-Engil, in which CCCC holds a 32% stake.

Chinese firms dominate the list without monopolizing it, and final contractor selection has been pushed back to early 2027 to give bidders time to arrange financing.

The financing follows the same logic. Ethiopian Airlines is funding 30% from its own balance sheet and has already committed $610m for earthworks. The African Development Bank signed a mandate letter in August 2025 as initial lead arranger, pledging a $500 million loan of its own and taking on the mobilization of roughly $8 billion more from development finance institutions, export credit agencies and commercial banks.

According to Ethiopian Airlines Group CEO Mesfin Tasew, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and JPMorgan Chase are among the institutions that have expressed interest; Ethiopian officials say lenders from China, Europe, and the Gulf have done the same.

Sliced this way, no single creditor or contractor can hold the project hostage, and every external partner has something to lose by walking away.

What Multi-Partnership Buys, and What It Costs

The advantages of the model are real. Competing bidders give the host government bargaining power over pricing, technology transfer, and local content. A diversified creditor pool spreads refinancing risk in a way single-source borrowing never did; Ethiopia’s experience servicing the Chinese loans behind the Addis Ababa–Djibouti railway is a recent reminder of the alternative.

The model also carries costs. Reconciling Chinese civil engineering standards with Western avionics and security certification, and satisfying a dozen lenders’ due diligence processes at once, demands administrative capacity that few African institutions possess. Ethiopian Airlines, profitable and professionally run, is one of the handful that plausibly does.

However, the project is not a procession of wins. Some $8 billion of the money has yet to reach financial close, with agreements targeted for March 2027. About 2,500 farming households were moved off the 35 km² site, resettled at a reported cost of $350 million, and parts of Oromia remain affected by armed conflict. Residents of Abu Lugna, a village on the proposed airport site, have publicly contested the terms of their displacement. How these grievances are handled will shape the project’s legitimacy at home, whatever happens abroad.

Competitive Coexistence

The mixed cast at Bishoftu can look like U.S.-China collaboration. Nothing of the sort is happening. No joint financing and no coordination exist between Washington and Beijing; each has settled into the segment where it holds an advantage: Chinese state firms in heavy civil works, American suppliers at the technological and commercial end.

They share the site because Ethiopia’s procurement design leaves them little choice.

Nor is Bishoftu an outlier. On the Lobito Corridor, the DFC committed a $553 million loan to upgrade the railway linking Angola’s coast to the Copperbelt, a package that closed in December 2025 alongside $200 million from the Development Bank of Southern Africa, in a region where Chinese firms control much of the mining the line will serve.

In both cases, an African government has set terms that require rivals to operate within the same territory rather than carve out exclusive spheres.

Whether Bishoftu vindicates the approach will become clear quickly. Contractor selection is due in early 2027, and the financial close is two months later. If Ethiopian Airlines lands both on terms it can service, other African capitals are very likely to adopt this playbook.

If the money arrives late or is expensive, the lesson will be harsher: balancing superpowers is a strategy available only to states holding an asset both sides want, and even then, the margin for error is thin.

Mandira Bagwandeen is a lecturer at Stellenbosch University, where she specializes in Africa-China relations and regional integration.