The Medog Hydropower Station, officially under construction on the Tibetan Plateau since July 2025, is planned to harness a 2,000 meter drop in the Yarlung Tsangpo, the same river that becomes the Brahmaputra in India and the Jamuna in Bangladesh.
In a remote corner of the Tibetan Plateau, China has begun building a hydropower station that, if completed as designed, would be the largest in the world. The Medog Hydropower Station broke ground on 19 July 2025 and is planned to generate about 300 terawatt-hours a year, roughly three times what the Three Gorges Dam currently produces, by threading diversion tunnels through the Namcha Barwa massif where the Yarlung Tsangpo river drops about 2,000 meters in a stretch of roughly 50 kilometers before turning into India as the Brahmaputra. As of June 2026, the project has been under construction for nearly eleven months.
The Yarlung Tsangpo's "Great Bend" sits at the seam where the Indian plate rams into Eurasia, the same tectonic collision that lifted the Himalayas and that geologists have linked to repeated large earthquakes along the eastern syntaxis. In 2022, engineers at the Sichuan Provincial Geological Bureau specifically warned that the project area faced significant risks from "earthquake-induced landslides and mud-rock flows," according to engineering assessments summarized in a profile of the project compiled on Wikipedia. Dr. Jogendranath Sharma, a geologist who has studied the corridor, has called the plan to impound and tunnel water in this zone a serious risk to downstream Assam and urged a joint Indo-China environmental impact assessment. Engineers and geologists who have spoken on the record do not have to predict a specific failure to make the structural point: the surrounding rock has not been publicly stress-tested for tunnelling and impoundment at this scale, and the data is not in the public record.
The river itself explains why the seismic question is also geopolitical. The Yarlung Tsangpo flows into India as the Brahmaputra and onward into Bangladesh as the Jamuna, supplying water to roughly two billion people downstream. Hydrological analysis summarized in the same project profile suggests the upstream dam's effect on flow may be limited, since about 65 to 70 percent of the Brahmaputra's annual discharge is generated inside India by monsoon rain and tributaries, and only about 25 percent of total flow comes from snow and glacial melt in upper Tibet. The political weight of the project, however, is set by what Beijing has not done. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar raised the dam at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers' meeting in China in July 2025 and called for the resumption of suspended hydrological data sharing. Bangladesh's government formally asked Beijing for more information in February 2025. China has not ratified the UN Watercourses Convention and has consistently declined bilateral water-sharing treaties with downstream states. Inside India, the political response is not uniform: Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has argued that a reduced upstream flow could help the state manage its annual flooding, a position consistent with the hydrological reading that most of the Brahmaputra's annual discharge is generated within India.
Inside China, the project has the explicit backing of the central leadership. During a 2025 visit to Tibet, President Xi Jinping called for the Medog project to be advanced "forcefully, systematically, and effectively," according to CNN reporting cited in the project profile. State-owned Power Construction Corporation of China, known as PowerChina, is the developer. The build, by design, is single-phase: commercial operations are planned for 2033, with total cost projected above 1 trillion yuan, roughly 137 billion US dollars, more than four times the Three Gorges price tag, according to figures compiled in the Wikipedia project profile. The design is a run-of-river gravity dam with a cascade of five stations and four diversion tunnels each about 20 kilometers long, intended to harness the river's vertical drop rather than store a large reservoir.
The Medog station is the largest piece in a much larger build-out. Since 2000, China has initiated or proposed 193 hydropower projects across Tibet, and the International Campaign for Tibet estimates the combined portfolio could displace more than 1.2 million people and affect numerous religious sites, figures that are advocacy claims, not official tallies, and that have not been independently verified. The Medog site itself sits in a sparsely populated gorge and is run-of-river, so direct displacement is expected to be smaller than the 1.4 million displaced by Three Gorges, but the project has not published site-specific figures.
What the public record shows is a project at unprecedented scale, on a river shared with two downstream states and in one of Asia's most seismically active corridors. The engineering stress data and the transboundary impact assessment are not in the public domain. The watch items for the next several years are whether Beijing releases a binding environmental and seismic study, whether it resumes the hydrological data sharing India has asked for, and whether the 2033 commercial date holds against the geology in the ground.