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A mining start-up backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is expanding into the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a bet that the resource-rich nation will be crucial to US efforts to compete with China for minerals that are needed for the energy transition.
KoBold Metals, which deploys artificial intelligence to identify untapped mineral deposits, was betting “big” on DR Congo, said Benjamin Katabuka, its newly appointed director-general in the country. The company would recruit staff in the country and planned to apply for licences to explore for lithium, copper and cobalt, he said.
The push into DR Congo comes as the African nation seeks to secure a minerals deal with the US, in talks that are part of President Donald Trump’s ambitions to break dependency on China for metals.
“KoBold is looking to go big in this country in terms of investment,” said Katabuka, a former employee of Freeport-McMoRan who has more than a decade of experience in the industry in DR Congo. “Investments could be in the billions.”
Massad Boulos, Trump’s newly appointed senior adviser for Africa, said last week that he and DR Congo President Felix Tshisekedi had in recent days discussed the development of a US-DR Congo minerals pact and had “chartered a path forward”.
“We’re having similar discussions with other neighbouring countries,” Boulos added. “Our role is to facilitate those private sector investments” in the mining sector, including with American government funding, he said.
DR Congo is the world’s number one supplier of cobalt, a metal used in the production of batteries for electric vehicles. But it is also in the midst of an armed conflict that has disrupted mining in the eastern part of the country, where the M23 rebel group has seized large areas of land.
Berkeley-based KoBold raised $537mn during its latest round in January from investors including Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, whose backers include Bezos and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. The company has raised $1bn to date.
Katabuka acknowledged it was “difficult” to do business in DR Congo and that the perception of corruption was “high”. KoBold would insist on “high standards” for its operations, he added.
Separately, several of the billionaires backing the mining operation have environmental and humanitarian interests in DR Congo through their philanthropic foundations.
The Bezos Earth Fund had pledged to protect the Congo basin, which the UN estimates stores about three years’ worth of global greenhouse gas emissions, from “degradation, deforestation and biodiversity loss” with grants of $110mn. The Gates Foundation is supporting agricultural programmes in the region.
KoBold is also among the companies that are interested in developing a huge lithium deposit in DR Congo that is the subject of a legal dispute between Australia’s AVZ Minerals and China’s state-backed Zijin Mining.
The deposit had “the potential to become a large-scale, long-lived lithium mine”, KoBold wrote to the DR Congo government in January, according to a letter obtained by the Financial Times.
Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold Metals Africa, said the company was prepared to “look at” potential acquisition targets, although its main focus was on making new discoveries.
Many mines in DR Congo are run by Chinese groups, and no big American mining companies have operated there since Freeport-McMoRan sold its stake in the Tenke Fungurume copper mine to China’s CMOC in 2016.
Katabuka said the Congolese government was “interested in having some western investors coming into the country”, which would help “balance” China’s presence.
DR Congo wanted more metals processing to be done within the country, but it lacked the necessary infrastructure to do that, with mining companies even “struggling to get enough power for their production”, he said.
