Mining

Mining operations are a priority of the venture capital industry; the LA Times reporting that:

"Venture capitalists invested more than $628 million in U.S. startups working on rare-earth minerals in 2025, according to PitchBook data, accounting for 90% of all funding globally. That represents a nearly 3,000% jump compared with 2024, and doesn’t account for government deals, including the U.S. Defense Department’s $400-million equity investment in July into MP Materials Corp., a publicly traded rare-earth manufacturer.

Companies looking to buy rare earths are also showing increased interest in sourcing the materials at home. Five days after the Pentagon’s investment, Apple Inc. agreed to buy $500 million of rare-earth products from MP.

'Rare earths are top of mind right now,' said Zachary Bogue, co-founder and managing partner at DCVC, whose firm backed two U.S.-based rare-earth startups last year. 'There’s geopolitical tensions. The U.S. can no longer rely on China for rare earths and critical minerals.'

The Trump administration has taken steps to support the rare-earths sector for national security purposes, saying it will guarantee minimum prices for producers and coordinating with allies to develop alternative supply chains. That federal support is making investing in rare-earth startups a safer bet...

Bogue of DCVC said recent advances in rare-earth mining and processing technologies give him confidence that U.S. startups can catch up to China’s established players. Alta Resource Technologies Inc., a startup that DCVC has invested in, leverages artificial intelligence and advanced biochemistry to aid in mineral separation and is working to scale up its operation to be cost-competitive against Chinese counterparts by 2027, according to Bogue."

African countries hold vast natural resources; the United Nations Environment Programme states that

"Africa is rich in natural resources ranging from arable land, water, oil, natural gas, minerals, forests and wildlife. The continent holds a huge proportion of the world’s natural resources, both renewables and non-renewables.

Africa is home to some 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves, eight per cent of the world’s natural Gas and 12 per cent of the world’s oil reserves. The continent has 40 percent of the world’s gold and up to 90 percent of its chromium and platinum. The largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum and uranium in the world are in Africa. It holds 65 per cent of the world’s arable land and ten percent of the planet’s internal renewable fresh water source."

Silicon Valley's venture capitalists are invested in a number of mining companies. The most advanced mining startup operating in Africa is KoBold Metals, which discovered a massive copper deposit in Zambia in 2024, using AI from its location in Berkeley, California. On March 16th, 2026, the New York Times reported that the U.S. State Department was considering withholding H.I.V. aid to Zambia "to force the government of the southern African country to sign a deal giving the United States more access to the country’s critical minerals... Some 1.3 million people in Zambia rely on daily H.I.V. treatment that is provided through the decades-old U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (known as PEPFAR) and on tuberculosis and malaria medications that save tens of thousands of Zambian lives each year." KoBold broke ground on the copper mine in Zambia in April 2026. KoBold relies on predictive AI modeling, major data collection, and new sensor technology, and is a case study in the venture capital thesis that breakthroughs in software, AI and data collection will give them the edge in markets that are new to them, and have large incumbents.

The discovery of new deposits and optimal mining sites is an important use case of AI. While most of the discussion about AI use cases focuses on consumer applications, the use of AI technology by mining startups to make significant discoveries shows its value for industrial operations.

KoBold has recieved $1.2 billion in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Earthshot Ventures, and Apollo Projects (Sam Altman's VC firm), as well as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo was previously colonized by Belgium, which still holds key geological records relevant to mining projects. KoBold is trying to gain access to these and other records, by offering AI digitization services. KoBold has been unsuccessful to date in its efforts to gain exclusive access to the Congo's colonial records, which "includes maps, field reports, aerial photographs, rock samples and other documents gathered during decades of geological exploration under Belgian colonial rule from 1885 to 1960... Belgian officials have argued that the museum cannot grant exclusive access to millions of documents about DR Congo’s geology to a foreign private company." However, KoBold has secured a deal with the DRC to digitize some data. In March 2026, KoBold entered an agreement with Burundi to digitize more geological information.

In April 2026, KoBold began a large-scale lithium exploration project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; from Reuters:

"KoBold uses AI, airborne sensors, and mobile labs to accelerate exploration...

The country is the world's top cobalt producer and Africa's ⁠largest copper supplier, with vast but largely unexplored lithium reserves, making it a key ​plank in global supply chains for electric vehicles and the clean energy transition. The ​U.S. established a formal agreement with Congo's government last year.

KoBold, an AI‑driven miner already active in copper exploration in Zambia, said the lithium exploration programme spans 13 exploration licences and involves airborne ​surveys across 30,000 square km (18,640 square miles), extensive drilling and large‑scale geochemical sampling, with ​lithium the primary target.

The company has already paid more than $20 million to Congo's treasury, making it ‌the ⁠largest new exploration investor in the central African nation in recent years, KoBold chief executive Kurt House said.

'A year ago, KoBold had no employees and no land in Congo,' House said in a statement. 'Today we are the largest American investor in the ​country, launching the most ​ambitious mineral exploration ⁠programme ever attempted.'"

Of note is the speed with which venture backed mining startups are moving into exploration, partnerships with sovereign countries, and active mining operations.

The book White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams, describes the role of the Congo's uranium mines in the Cold War and the development of the original Manhattan Project:

"Congolese ore was essential for the Manhattan Project, which produced the world’s first atomic weapons and was led by the United States, with some assistance from Britain and Canada. This uranium was used to build the first atomic bomb to be tested: the Trinity test in New Mexico, in July 1945, which launched the atomic age. It was also used to build the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month—on 6 August and 9 August, respectively.

The source of the ore was the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga, the southern province of the Congo. Shinkolobwe produced uranium that was far richer than any other uranium in the world: it assayed as high as 75 per cent uranium oxide, with an average of 65 per cent. By contrast, ores of marketable quality from the Colorado Plateau in the US and from Canada contained two-tenths of 1 per cent uranium oxide, while ores derived from South African gold mines had a uranium oxide content on the order of 0.03 per cent...

‘The Belgian Congo’, wrote a senior chemical engineer involved in the work of the Manhattan Project in 1943 to L R Groves, the director of the project, ‘offers natural resources of extreme importance to our domestic economy. Its known resources of uranium, which are the world’s largest, are vital to the welfare of the United States’. The correspondence noted, too, that in addition to uranium, ‘the reserves of copper, industrial diamonds, cobalt and probably tantalite are among the world’s largest’. The report concluded, ‘Definite steps should be taken to insure access to the resources for the United States.’"

This history is instructive in light of venture capitalists' new Manhattan Project, which was presented in Palantir CEO Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic: "The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield -- the targeting systems and swarms of drones and eventually robots that will become the most powerful weapons of this century."

The Congolese miners who mined uranium for the Manhattan Project suffered severe conditions and effects, including minuscule pay, confinement in the mining compound, DNA damage, renal failure, cancer and other medical catastrophes.

This legacy has continued through the supply chains of the tech giants; the article "Cobalt mining for Big Tech is driving child labor, deaths in the Congo" interviews the author of the book, Cobalt Red, an expose of so-called "artisanal" cobalt mining in DRC:

"... a brutal industry where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children dig with bare hands and basic tools in toxic, perilous pits, eking out an existence on the bottom rung of the global supply chain.

The miners are the first step in the race for precious metals and minerals by some of the world’s most powerful companies, with multibillion-dollar valuations and whose founders and CEOs are household names...

Around 75 per cent of the world’s cobalt is mined in the DRC -- and the world cannot get enough of it. The rare, silvery metal is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery, a necessary part of the booming electric vehicle (EV) industry...

The DRC’s industrial mines are typically structured as joint ventures between the national government and foreign operators, for the most part Chinese companies. China produces three-quarters of the world’s refined cobalt, the keys to the kingdom in the battery market.

'Everyone’s playing catch up. China cornered the global cobalt supply chain before anyone knew what was going on,' Mr [Siddharth] Kara told The Independent in a phone interview... 'Ten years later, western Europe and North America suddenly realize this vital mineral is required for our green energy future and gadget device-driven economy, and they can’t access it except through China.'

About two-thirds of cobalt mining is carried out in industrial mines with the use of heavy machinery, and accompanied by health and safety standards.

Artisanal production makes up the remaining share. However, Mr Kara writes in Cobalt Red that '[b]ecause ASM is almost entirely informal, artisanal miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions.

There are an estimated two million artisanal miners in the DRC, according to DelveDatabase, a global online data platform...

Mr Kara describes in his book how he witnessed hundreds of children crouching in the rubble, picking for cobalt fragments.

The author describes the appalling living conditions of Congolese artisanal miners. Many live in tarp-covered shacks with no sanitation, medical care and few opportunities for education. Access to electricity is sparse; few miners have ever seen a cameraphone.

Cobalt Red also documents many unreported deaths, including those of children buried alive in makeshift mining tunnels, and their bodies never recovered.

The author shares the stories of Congolese miners who have experienced life-changing injuries, sexual assault, physical violence, corruption, displacement and abject poverty.

'Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected,' Mr Kara writes."

Mining in Africa is tied to the cold war between China and the U.S., where venture capital is increasingly acting as the tip of the spear for U.S. imperialism.

From Andreessen Horowitz's investment thesis report on mining,

"Critical minerals are the quiet enablers of modern power. They sit at the heart of technologies that define contemporary life and security, including electric vehicles, satellites, precision-guided weapons, batteries, and more....

Many mines underperform not just due to technical challenges, but because of deeper process issues: permitting delays, unrealistic feasibility assumptions, or setbacks in execution. Others stall out entirely — not for lack of resources, but due to fragmented data systems, siloed teams, and institutional resistance to change. Shockingly, many core workflows still depend on spreadsheets, clipboards, and decades-old software. It’s not uncommon to find consultants and contractors piecing together whiteboards with legacy desktop tools running on Windows XP. As ore grades decline and margins tighten, the cost of this inefficiency becomes lethal...

In America, permitting spans federal, state, and tribal levels. In emerging markets, political and logistical challenges dominate, and issues like corruption and conflict often complicate matters. Either way, timelines are typically measured in years or decades, not months...

A ton of lithium hydroxide, for example, can sell for many multiples of its inputs. And even small gains in recovery or uptime can radically boost economics. Advanced in-line sensors, real-time analytics, AI-driven control systems, and modularity, as well as novel chemical processes, promise to further raise yields and reduce costly waste. Yet, such innovations often remain stuck in pilot stages and underutilized...

The companies best positioned to win won’t operate at a single point in the chain; they’ll control multiple stages of it. That requires more than policy declarations or singular technological solutions; it demands serious capital and an entirely new industrial model. We’ve backed KoBold Metals to help reinvent exploration, but the United States needs more companies that build and operate scaled assets, extending across the value chain with technology embedded at the core of their operations...

What America needs is a mining champion: a software-native, product-driven company that treats mining and metals as a systems engineering challenge. For this company, processing is not a bottleneck, but the heart of the business. It must absorb risk, deploy unproven tools early, and architect an integrated platform with long-term customer agreements from day one. In doing so, it doesn’t just build a better mining company, but an industrial flywheel. One capable of compounding technology, scale, and operational learnings into durable advantage across multiple commodities. And one that can grow into the technology-enabled, integrated major needed to challenge China’s lead."

Additional mining companies backed by venture capitalists include Mariana Minerals, which currently has sites across the U.S.; Phoenix Tailings, a refinery startup to serve "the military systems that protect our shores", and funded by CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel; and Alta Resource Technologies, also funded by In-Q-Tel, DARPA, Voyager Ventures and DCVC. Allonia, which leverages "a biologically derived solution selected and engineered to go after specific impurity minerals while leaving the metal you’re after untouched... demonstrated results on nickel, copper, and molybdenum concentrates, with lithium, zinc, and iron in active screening..." It is funded by General Atlantic. EARTH AI, for new mine discovery, uses an AI model "trained on 400 million geological sites," and is funded by Y Combinator and DCVC.