Having lagged behind that country's investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.
Zambia's Copper Colonialism
In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn't much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.
"We meet at a historic moment," President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the "biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever" and affirmed the West's interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. "America," he added, "is all in on Africa" We're all in with you and Angola."
Both Africa and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that's precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America's regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position -- and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.
In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country's total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia's Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it's much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.
"Friends tell you that there's a danger as they're coming out of shift," a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. "You'll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time" The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren't stable" In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain" didn't put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm."
An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there's a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.
AI Mining for AI Energy
The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia's dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold's nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world's green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).
It is in KoBold's interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe's total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.
"Anyone who's in the renewable space in the western world" is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles," Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. "That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito."
Makayi wasn't beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won't end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold's CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: "I don't need to be reminded again that I'm a capitalist," he's been known to quip.
In July 2024, House rang his company's investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually -- or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold's investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.
"The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia," says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. "The link between resource and benefit is severed."
Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but -- consider it a guarantee -- its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.
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