Top 10 Largest Dams in the World

The largest dam in the world, by the measure most people mean, is China's Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which has the greatest power-generating capacity of any power station on Earth, 22,500 megawatts. But "largest" can be measured in several ways, and each gives a different winner. The tallest dam is China's Jinping-I, at 305 m. The dam holding back the most water is Kariba, on the Zambezi between Zambia and Zimbabwe, whose reservoir holds about 180 km³. The largest reservoir by surface area is Lake Volta, behind Ghana's Akosombo Dam. Below are the top 10 dams by power capacity, followed by the leaders on the other measures.

Four Ways to Measure a Dam

Engineers and geographers compare dams by four main measures. Height is measured from the lowest point of the foundation to the crest. Reservoir capacity is the volume of water the dam impounds, usually given in cubic kilometres. Installed capacity is the maximum electricity its turbines can produce, in megawatts. And structural volume is the amount of concrete, earth or rock in the dam itself. A tall, thin arch dam in a narrow canyon may hold back a modest reservoir, while a long, low embankment across a wide valley can create an enormous lake. Rankings by power are the most common, because a dam's generating capacity reflects both its height and the flow of the river behind it.

The Top 10 by Power Capacity

Five of the ten are in China, and four of those sit on the Jinsha, the upper course of the Yangtze, which drops steeply out of the Tibetan Plateau through deep gorges in Yunnan and Sichuan. Three are in Brazil, which gets more than half of its electricity from hydropower.

Three Gorges: The Giant on the Yangtze

The Three Gorges Dam, near Yichang in Hubei province, is a concrete gravity dam about 181 m high and 2,335 m long. Construction began in 1994, the reservoir began to fill in 2003, and the last of its main turbines entered service in 2012. It has 32 main turbines of 700 megawatts each, plus two smaller units. Its reservoir stretches about 600 km upstream, almost to Chongqing, and holds around 39 km³ of water. Besides generating power, the dam is designed to control the Yangtze's deadly floods and to let larger ships sail far inland through a five-step ship lock and a ship lift that raises vessels 113 m in one go.

The cost was high. About 1.3 million people were relocated, and more than a thousand towns and villages, along with archaeological sites, were flooded. Scientists have linked the reservoir to increased landslides along its banks, and the dam traps sediment that once built up the Yangtze Delta. The full story is in our guide to the Three Gorges Dam.

Itaipu: The Record Producer

Although Three Gorges has the larger capacity, Itaipu, on the Paraná River between Brazil and Paraguay, has at times generated more electricity in a year, because the Paraná flows strongly and evenly all year, while the Yangtze's flow varies with the seasons. In 2016 Itaipu produced about 103 terawatt-hours, a world record at the time, although Three Gorges surpassed it in 2020. Opened in 1984 and owned equally by the two countries, it supplies around 10 per cent of Brazil's electricity and the great majority of Paraguay's, which sells much of its share back to Brazil. Its construction flooded the Guaíra Falls, once one of the most powerful waterfalls in the world. More is in our guide to the Itaipu Dam.

The Tallest Dams

Height rankings are dominated by China and Central Asia. Jinping-I, on the Yalong River in Sichuan, completed in 2013, is a double-curvature concrete arch dam 305 m high, the tallest dam of any kind in operation. Nurek, on the Vakhsh River in Tajikistan, completed in 1980, is 300 m high, an earth-fill embankment that was the world's tallest for more than thirty years. Further up the same river, Tajikistan's Rogun Dam, begun in Soviet times and restarted in 2016, is designed to reach 335 m, which would make it the tallest in the world. Other giants include China's Lianghekou, at about 295 m, and Xiaowan, at about 294 m.

In Europe, the Grande Dixence in the Swiss Alps, 285 m high and completed in 1961, is the tallest gravity dam in the world, holding back glacier meltwater at an altitude of about 2,365 m. The Inguri Dam in Georgia, at 271.5 m, is one of the tallest concrete arch dams outside China.

The Biggest Reservoirs

The Kariba Dam, completed in 1959, created a lake more than 220 km long. About 57,000 Tonga people living along the Zambezi were moved away from the river to make way for it. Lake Volta, created when the Akosombo Dam was finished in 1965, covers about 8,500 km², some 3.6 per cent of Ghana's area, making it the largest reservoir in the world by surface. The Manicouagan Reservoir in Quebec fills a ring-shaped crater made by an asteroid impact about 214 million years ago, and it is easily seen from space. The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, ended the Nile's annual flood and created Lake Nasser, but it also forced the relocation of the temples of Abu Simbel and of around 100,000 Nubians, a story told in our guide to the Aswan High Dam.

The Bulkiest Dams

Measured by the material in the structure itself, the leaders are embankment dams, built of compacted earth and rock rather than concrete. Pakistan's Tarbela Dam on the Indus, completed in 1976, is about 143 m high and nearly 2.7 km long, and it is usually described as the largest earth-filled dam in the world, containing well over 100 million m³ of fill. It is also one of Pakistan's most important sources of power and irrigation water. The Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River in Montana, finished in 1940, was the largest earth-fill dam of its time, built in the Great Depression partly to create jobs. Concrete dams are far smaller in volume, but denser. Three Gorges contains about 27 million m³ of concrete, more than any other dam, most of it poured between 1998 and 2006.

Different dam types suit different places. Gravity dams, like Three Gorges and Grande Dixence, resist the water with sheer weight. Arch dams, like Jinping-I, curve upstream and push the water's force sideways into the canyon walls, so they can be much thinner. Hoover combines the two as an arch-gravity dam. Embankment dams, like Nurek and Tarbela, are wide mounds of earth and rock with a watertight core, suited to broad valleys and places with frequent earthquakes.

Hoover, Grand Coulee and the American Era

For much of the twentieth century, the giants were American. The Hoover Dam, on the Colorado River on the border between Nevada and Arizona, was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed in 1936, at 221 m, and Lake Mead behind it is still the largest reservoir in the United States by capacity. The Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington State, completed in 1942, is the country's largest power producer and, with about 9 million m³ of concrete, one of the largest concrete structures ever built.

Newcomers and New Records

The next generation of giant dams is in Asia and Africa. Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, on the Blue Nile, with a planned capacity of 5,150 megawatts, is the largest hydropower plant in Africa and was officially inaugurated in September 2025. Egypt and Sudan have long feared it will reduce the Nile's flow downstream. In Tibet, China has begun building a dam on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo, the upper course of the Brahmaputra, that could eventually produce around three times as much power as Three Gorges, worrying India and Bangladesh downstream.

Large dams can also fail catastrophically. In 1975 the collapse of the Banqiao Dam in central China, after a typhoon brought extreme rain, killed tens of thousands of people. In 1963 a landslide into the reservoir behind the Vajont Dam in northern Italy sent a wave over the top that killed about 2,000 people, though the dam itself survived. Such disasters, and the loss of rivers, forests and homes that every reservoir brings, are why each new giant is as controversial as it is impressive.