According to the latest news on Monday, KoBoldMetals, a Silicon Valley unicorn that uses AI to explore metals needed for green transformation such as copper and lithium, announced that the company has discovered giant copper reserves on the Mingomba project in Zambia.
From this project, the efficiency of AI can also be seen - KoBoldMetals announced that it would invest nearly $150 million to buy a majority stake in the Mingomba deposit during the Biden Africa Tour in mid-December 2022, and then took just over a year to achieve results.
For many Chinese investors, compared with KoBold Metals, they may be more familiar with the name of the investors behind the company - the Breakthrough Energy venture capital fund led by Bill Gates, Bezos, Ma, Son Masayoshi, Dalio, Bloomberg and other people participate in the investment, as well as well-known institutions such as Pris, a16z and Norwegian Statoil.
What's the latest breakthrough?
Regarding the size of the new copper deposits, KoBold President Josh Goldman cited the potential for future development of the Mingomba deposit, which is similar to Ivanhoe Mines and Zijin Mining's Kakula mine in the border region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a world-class mine that produced nearly 400,000 tons of copper last year.
"Mingomba's story is similar to Kakula's in both size and taste," Goldman said. It will be one of the highest grade large underground mines in the world."
KoBold is using its AI technology to process drilling data to optimize exploration at the Mingomba copper and cobalt mine. While the company is aiming for its first output after 2030, it will now prepare a new resource assessment and complete a feasibility study to advance the decision to build the mine. Goldman estimates that the investment required to develop such a mine could exceed $2 billion.
Don't care about recent price fluctuations
In recent days, the price of battery materials such as cobalt, nickel and lithium has continued to fall and affect a number of projects around the world, KoBold said that this will not be a concern for the company in the short term.
Goldman said it raised the capital precisely to make long-term investments. 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 there is increasing demand for metals from wind and solar farms, high-voltage cables and electric vehicles. Many mining giants have also warned that these green transformation-related projects could cause demand for metals such as copper to outstrip supply.
After COP28 last year, for example, analysts at Citibank predicted that increased global renewable energy targets would provide 4.2 million tonnes of additional copper demand by 2030. This has the potential to boost copper prices to $15,000 a tonne by 2025. For reference, LME copper has traded around $8,500 in recent weeks, compared with its all-time high of $10,730 in March last year.
The Mingomba mine is KoBold's most advanced project, but the company is also exploring more than 60 sites in Australia, Canada and the United States. In December, the company announced the discovery of several potential lithium deposits in Namibia, Quebec and Nevada.
KoBold said the company spent nearly $100 million on exploration in 2023 and expects to exceed that figure this year. He also stressed that KoBold is now spending as much on exploration as BHP, Rio Tinto and other giants.
