Modern computing – and AI – require ever more energy. Policymakers and directors of major tech companies are demanding solutions for powering – and cooling – computing infrastructure, perhaps through nuclear power and certainly through fossil fuels.

Strategic minerals form an equally critical component of the AI revolution. They go into burgeoning electronics, communications, green energy and other economic sectors across the globe. The extraction and processing of such minerals and metals as lithium, graphite and cobalt will need to increase by at least 500 per cent by 2050, with many of them coming from Africa. China, the US, the EU and Russia are competing for access to the strategic minerals of the AI age. Yet the extraction, milling, processing and transporting of the minerals are lagging because of poorly developed African mining and processing infrastructures, as well as national priorities. Bottlenecks and geopolitical confrontations loom ahead.

Unfortunately, in patterns reminiscent of 19th- and 20th-century colonial exploitation, powerful global actors are taking advantage of political weakness on the African continent to secure mineral wealth through investment projects. Yet these rarely overcome technological weaknesses in transport, energy and communication infrastructures beyond specific mining regions. Overcoming these weaknesses would be of great benefit both to the exporters and the purchasers of minerals.

The African continent consists of 54 countries and island territories of critical geo-technological importance because of its vast mineral wealth. Yet harnessing those resources has been challenging. Obstacles to the development of mineral resources in Africa include: road congestion and often impassable roads; the absence of a continental network for highways or railways; the absence of intermodal transportation; and tax, tariff, customs, documents and other bureaucratic and sovereign border barriers. Furthermore, the financial, technological and other projects advanced by China, the EU, the US, and Russia to secure mineral wealth continue to ignore the social and environmental needs of the continent.

Major customers inevitably shape Africa’s mineral trade. The US, with the Trump administration engaged in tariff wars, may be missing opportunities for long-term, mutually beneficial trade agreements. China is actively filling any void where it can, and ensuring that its own programmes are well-fed with African minerals. Russia’s presence is handicapped by subservience to mercenary military programmes, and its lack of interest in supporting the economic development of African clients.

China’s growing economy, second only to the US, demands copper, zinc, nickel and other minerals for electronics, electronic vehicles, telephone batteries, solar and wind power, and other alternatives to fossil fuels. It imports $100 billion of base metals every year, consuming more than 25 per cent of the world’s supplies, and it imports many of these minerals from Africa. During the 1990s, trade between China and Africa grew by 700 per cent, and skyrocketed from $1.4 billion in 1995 to $28.7 billion in 2006, reaching $282.1 billion in 2023. As the world’s largest importer of critical minerals, China dominates refining.

In 2006, recognising the need for stable supplies, China announced plans for a Strategic Mineral Reserve to stockpile uranium, copper, aluminium, lithium and other minerals. In the same year, China released its ‘African Policy‘, which elaborated its objectives, including at some point to negotiate Free Trade Agreements (FTA). China, once seen as a developing country that understood colonialism, would work towards a state of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ with African clients who, apparently, were attracted to a sympathetic former colonial state. China promised direct investment, preferential loans, buyer credits, favourable tax laws in both directions, agricultural cooperation, and infrastructure, including transportation, communication, water conservancy, electricity and more.

China is the largest bilateral creditor to Africa, providing the continent’s countries with extensive infrastructure, mining and energy financing. Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) peaked at $5 billion in 2022. Chinese mining and battery companies have invested $4.5 billion in lithium mines in Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Mali. China has invested in 15 out of 17 cobalt mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Zambia has the most extensive level of business with China, which has secured direct equity interests in its copper, coal, and manganese reserves; for example, an 85 per cent stake in the Chambishi copper mine. Chambishi operations include treatment of cobalt/copper sulphide/oxide concentrates, and cobalt carbonate/hydroxide materials. These materials have brought environmental disaster to the region and an ongoing drought has forced production to be scaled back.

Yet significant inequalities persist in African trade. African countries export natural resources and raw minerals, import a wide range of finished goods and equipment, and pay the human and environmental price of mining. For example, by 2006, China had invested $130 million in South Africa, much of it in the Buffelsfontein chromium mine. In 2025, Buffelsfontein was the site of a disaster where 87 workers were trapped and killed. In February 2025, a disaster involving a tailings storage facility (TSF) run by Sino-Metals Leach Zambia occurred. Such hazardous and carcinogenic substances as arsenic, cyanide, uranium and other heavy metals have polluted a major river system flowing through the town of Chambishi and the nearby city of Kitwe; with roughly 700,000 inhabitants, it is one of Zambia’s biggest cities and a hub for international mining companies.

To access minerals requires Chinese and other businesses to ignore local violence. Natural resource development has a history of conflict. People in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado region have suffered through violence and dislocation for years, in part because of attacks by ISIS, and also over grievances driven precisely by the development of mineral resources. Perhaps 100,000 people have fled the area since January 2025.

Worse still, in the eastern DRC, conflict over minerals has fuelled armed groups committing horrendous abuses against the civilian population. Since the onset of the Second Congo War in 1998, control over the DRC’s vast mineral resources has driven conflict between armed groups and militias, contributing to the deaths of millions. The violent, Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group has seized territory in areas rich in gold as well as cobalt and coltan, both important minerals used in electronics, and keeps control through the systematic rape and murder of women and children. In August 2025, the US government sanctioned the entities linked to the violence and illegal mining. The recent peace deal between Rwanda and the DRC, brokered by Donald Trump, appears to be a ploy by Washington to challenge Beijing’s existing grip on the region’s mineral wealth. But progress in stopping the M23’s attacks has been minimal, and massacres continue. International organisations and direct customers of African mines should take responsibility, but this violence has not discouraged Chinese mining interests in the DRC.

China has pursued technical cooperation through the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC, 2000-present). FOCAC activities include: targeted debt relief; participation in peacekeeping operations in places such as Liberia, DRC and Sudan; cheap loans linked to infrastructure development; support for Africa in such global organisations as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank; arms deals; a pledge of political non-interference in internal policies; and the promotion of ‘south-south’ linkages. Putting its money where its minerals are, China has, since 2000, committed more than $170 billion in grants and loans for highways, ports, and railways.

Other Chinese-financed projects include the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway; the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR, 2017); and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), on the Blue Nile. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, or New Silk Road) was designed to be a land-based trans-continental passage connecting China with Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Russia and Europe that includes transport and digital components. For African nations, the dangers of the BRI include taking on too much debt. The inability of Kenya to pay its loans on the SGR suggests to some observers that the projects are predatory, with Kenya giving up mineral rights in exchange for funding.

Through Huawei and ZTE, China has helped expand access to mobile and internet services, including fibre optics and network antennae. But Huawei’s involvement has been controversial in the West. The US claims that Huawei is a security threat, and has campaigned against the company by threatening to limit trade and intelligence-sharing with allies that use it in their 5G infrastructure. Huawei, in fact, is being investigated for ‘active corruption within the European Parliament‘, including bribes, gifts, and football tickets.

Unfortunately, the history of African railways is a 150-year history of failed projects dating back to British and French colonialism. Outdated infrastructure and limited maintenance have left only 70 per cent of railways fully operational, and there tends to be a very low network density. Freight and passenger transport are heavily concentrated in northern Africa and the Republic of South Africa, accounting for over 80 per cent of the total. Might the demand for African minerals generate sufficient interest, financing and technical assistance to enable modernisation of railways elsewhere?

Through the G7, the US and the EU have joined forces with the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) to launch alternatives to the New Silk Road. One is Trans-Africa Rail, a project begun in 2009 for a railway network from Sudan in the east to Cameroon in the west. Another mega-project concerns plans to resurrect the ‘Lobito Corridor’ with the Zambia–Lobito railway, which will together form a link across Africa through a number of large mineral- and oil-rich parts of Angola, the DRC, and Zambia. The US State Department underlined the project’s importance to ‘enhance regional trade and growth as well as advance the shared vision of connected, open-access rail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean’.

Russia’s vainglorious, stumbling and costly railway history rests on slave-labour projects from the time of the Tsars and then Stalin, but Russian capitalists see an opening in Africa. Russia’s largest transport and logistics holding company proposes to construct a railway through Ethiopia to the west coast, perhaps to be part of a trans-African network extending from Egypt to South Africa, or from Egypt through the Central African Republic. As yet, the African nations have not responded to the Kremlin, in part because of Russia’s poor record of construction abroad, as well as its controversial use of mercenaries on the continent.

Rosatom hopes for lucrative contracts in nuclear energy, including for power and desalination plants. But the huge costs of nuclear, and problems with the quality and extent of African energy grids, makes this unlikely beyond the start of construction at an Egyptian plant at El Dabaa. Cooperative agreements with an additional 17 African governments have gone nowhere.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left Russia in economic and military decay. The economy has recovered significantly because of its oil and gas reserves, but has lost its position as an important actor in Africa. Continuing to seek influence in and support from African nations in international affairs, and needing African markets and commodities for strategic reasons, Russia encourages cooperation in security, weapons trade, oil and gas, and atomic energy. It needs this trade in strategic minerals, especially after sanctions imposed following the invasion of Ukraine, but it is at a distinct disadvantage compared to other countries.

Russia is a minor, but visible actor in African mining politics. Russia uses mercenaries, such as the Wagner Group, to foment instability and secure minerals. As a recent RAND report notes, ‘Russian mercenaries have operated a nimble expeditionary force, seemingly unencumbered by international rules of war, which has bolstered authoritarian regimes in Africa at the expense of the civilian populations’ and the countries’ overall security.’

Russia is in Africa for gold and rare earth elements (REEs). Through Wagner, it has extracted $104 million per month in gold from the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mali, for a total of $2.5 billion. But it needs more and more REEs for communications, electronics, renewable energy technologies, and defence systems. According to RAND, the DRC has emerged ‘as a prime target in Russia’s mineral quest’, given its cobalt reserves, which are needed for phones and EVs.

Wagner has no interest in human rights, democracy, or legal frameworks. Russia’s Private Military Companies (PMCs) first arrived in Africa under a contract with the Libyan Cement Company in 2017. In 2018, the Russian government signed a military cooperation agreement with the Central African Republic, leading to the deployment of the Wagner Group. The PMCs have swiftly extended their presence into Sudan, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Libya. The group trains local armed forces to use Russian-supplied arms, protects Russian-operated gold, uranium, and diamond mines, and acts as bodyguard and advisor to the Central African president. Through PMCs, Russia is seeking to break the diplomatic and economic isolation imposed by the West.

Russia has maintained a military presence in the region through arms sales for a long time. The Russian Federation is the continent’s single largest supplier of arms. Russia has concluded military cooperation agreements with 43 African countries, and is a major, though declining, arms supplier to Africa. Cooperation has nothing to do with ‘democratisation’ and indeed Russia has continued its military cooperation in countries hit by civil unrest. Russia controls half of the African arms market. Russian arms are sold to 14 African countries, while Algeria, Egypt, and Angola together account for 94 per cent of the value of arms sales in the region. By providing an alternative supplier of weapons, Russia has strived to disrupt long-standing security ties between NATO countries and their African partners.

AI requires power for data centres, upgraded infrastructure, and new energy strategies. The mining of strategic minerals requires many of these things. Electricity and water are central to mineral mining. But, like transport infrastructure, they lag in Africa in terms of operation, potential and vision. One possibility is to build new dams. The African Development Bank partnered with the International Hydropower Association (IHA) ‘to map the status of current hydropower plants on the continent and identify modernization requirements’. IHA determined that upgrading and modernisation are ‘urgently needed in Africa as 60 per cent of hydropower facilities throughout the region are over 20 years old’ and functioning poorly.

Mostly, investment to African energy production and transmission comes from only a few countries and multilateral financing entities – including China, France, Italy, the United States, and the World Bank Group, and projects tend to be focused on gas or liquefied natural gas (LNG), mixed fossil fuels, and solar energy sources.

The mineral wealth of Africa thus provides a challenge to its holders, from South Africa to Zambia and to the DRC, and to countries pursuing the strategic minerals that undergird the AI revolution. The challenges reflect domestic handicaps such as political instability, lack of infrastructure, lags in communications, and growing debt burdens.

Geopolitical factors play a major role here, too. China has recognised the crucial place of strategic minerals in its burgeoning, modern economy, and has invested widely in them and in railways and other projects to support their exploitation. The Russian presence is also apparent, if much smaller and weakened by its primarily military and mercenary efforts to gain influence while at war in Ukraine.

As for the US, given Trump’s fascination with trade wars and his casual approach to other nations’ sovereignty, it is hard to imagine how the US can positively influence the situation, let alone substantively increase its presence in African mineral markets. This situation is a great turnaround from the Biden administration, whose Africa strategy emphasised that the United States will assist African countries to ‘leverage’ their critical mineral resources for economic development while ‘helping to strengthen supply chains that are diverse, open, and predictable’. The Biden administration pursued high-level visits to nations such as Zambia, whose copper reserves are a critical commodity.

Data centres, electric vehicles, energy storage and other components of the AI age require significantly more lithium, with demand forecast to increase by more than 1,500 per cent by 2050. Meanwhile, cobalt demand is projected to double by the mid-1930s, and graphite 500 per cent by the 2050, and so on. All of these vital minerals are subject to extensive geopolitical and supply risks. More dialogue is needed about the regional, national and international powers that compete for 21st-century minerals, and the African nations that must bear the stark local and environmental costs of mineral competition and exploitation.