The global race for technological supremacy now runs on cobalt, lithium, rare earths, and coltan – the minerals that make possible everything from electric vehicle batteries to semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Rare earths, a group of 17 metals essential to electronics and defence technologies, and coltan, the ore used to produce tantalum for smartphones and aerospace components, have become the building blocks of twenty-first-century power. Whoever controls their supply controls the infrastructure of our digital age.
China understood this decades ago and built a near monopoly, commanding around 70 percent of global rare earth mining and roughly 90 percent of the processing capacity that turns raw ore into usable material. The US and its allies are now scrambling to catch up. But what rarely features in coverage of this great power competition is that the minerals at the centre of it are overwhelmingly located in African soil.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone holds roughly 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, alongside vast deposits of coltan and copper. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique possess significant reserves of graphite, lithium and nickel. Africa is not peripheral to the technology economy. It is foundational to it. Yet most African producers remain confined to the lowest-value end of the supply chain, exporting raw ore while refining, manufacturing and profit accumulation take place elsewhere.
