According to the latest news on Monday, Silicon Valley unicorn KoBold Metals, which uses AI to explore copper, lithium and other metals needed for the green transition, announced that,The company discovered huge copper reserves at the Mingomba project in Zambia. From this project, we can also see the efficiency of AI——KoBoldMetals announced that it would invest nearly US$150 million to buy a majority stake in the Mingomba deposit during the "Biden Africa Tour" in mid-December 2022, and it took just over a year to achieve results.



For many Chinese investors, they may be more familiar with the name of the investors behind this company than KoBoldMetals - the Breakthrough Energy Venture Capital Fund, led by Bill Gates, with participation from Bezos, Jack Ma, Masayoshi Son, Dalio, Bloomberg and others, as well as well-known institutions such as Pulse, a16z and Statoil.

What are the latest breakthroughs?

Regarding the scale of newly discovered copper reserves, KoBold President Josh Goldman gave an example,The future development potential of the Mingomba deposit is similar to that of Ivanhoe Mines and Zijin Mining’s Kakula copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo border area. This world-class copper mine produced nearly 400,000 tons of copper last year.

Goldman said: "The story of Mingomba is similar to Kakula in terms of scale and taste. This will be one of the highest-grade large-scale underground mines in the world."

It is reported that KoBold uses its artificial intelligence technology to process drilling data to optimize the exploration work of the Mingomba copper and cobalt mine. While the company aims to achieve first production after 2030, it will now prepare a new resource assessment report and complete a feasibility study to advance the decision to build the mine. Goldman expected,To develop such a mine, the investment required may exceed US$2 billion.

Don't care about recent price fluctuations

Regarding the fact that the prices of battery materials such as cobalt, nickel and lithium have continued to fall in recent days and have affected multiple projects around the world, KoBold believes that this will not be a concern for the company in the short term.

Goldman said that the company launched financing precisely to carry outInvest for the long term.For KoBold, the price of these commodities in 2035 will be very important, but the company does not care about the price in 2024.

The company's business logic is that demand for the metal is increasing for wind and solar farms, high-voltage cables and electric vehicles. Many mining giants have also warned that these projects related to green transformation may cause the supply of copper and other metals to exceed demand.

For example, after COP28 was held last year, Citibank analysts expected that the increase in global renewable energy goals will provide 4.2 million tons of additional copper demand by 2030.This will have the potential to boost copper prices to US$15,000/ton in 2025. For reference, LME copper prices have been around $8,500 in recent weeks, while the all-time high was $10,730 in March last year.


(LME copper daily chart, source: TradingView)

It is worth mentioning that the Mingomba mine is the fastest-growing project in KoBold’s hands, but the company is also exploring in more than 60 areas in Australia, Canada and the United States. In December last year, the company announced the discovery of several potential lithium deposits in Namibia, Quebec and Nevada.

KoBold said the company will spend nearly $100 million on exploration in 2023 and expects to exceed this figure this year. He also emphasized that the amount of money KoBold now spends on exploration is comparable to the scale of giants such as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.