KoBold Metals breaks ground on Zambia's $2bn-plus Mingomba copper mine

KoBold Metals and Zambian state miner ZCCM-IH broke ground on shaft construction at the Mingomba copper project in Chililabombwe, on the Zambian Copperbelt, on 29 April 2026. The ceremony was attended by President Hakainde Hichilema, outgoing US ambassador Michael Gonzales, mines minister Paul Kabuswe and senior leadership from both partners, underscoring the project's status as a flagship of Zambia's push to triple national copper output to 3 million tonnes a year by 2031.

An AI-driven discovery

KoBold, backed by investors including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, describes Mingomba as the product of its proprietary machine-learning exploration technology, which it used to identify a high-grade copper resource deep underground after acquiring the project in December 2022. The company says the deposit is one of the highest-grade undeveloped copper orebodies in the world, and the mine, expected to reach roughly 1,700 metres below surface, will be among the deepest on the African continent. KoBold Africa chief executive Mfikeyi Makayi said at the ceremony that shaft sinking is expected to begin in early 2027, and at that pace the company aims to bring the mine into production in the early 2030s.

KoBold Global chief executive Kurt House invoked a Bemba proverb, Imiti ikula epanga, or the little trees become the forest, to describe the scale of ambition behind the project, which the company says has already put more than $200 million into the Zambian economy even before formal construction began.

Why it matters

Mingomba is being built at an estimated cost of more than $2 billion and is expected to produce around 300,000 tonnes of copper a year once in full operation, positioning it among the continent's largest copper mines. For Zambia, a country whose economy is heavily reliant on copper export earnings, a project of this scale from a well-capitalised Silicon Valley-backed developer is a significant vote of confidence, arriving as global demand for copper used in electric vehicles and grid infrastructure continues to rise.

What happens next

Construction now moves into the multi-year shaft-sinking phase, a technically demanding and capital-intensive process that typically determines whether a deep underground mine meets its schedule. KoBold has said it has sufficient capacity to progress the project independently for now, though its executives have not ruled out bringing in partners as the build advances toward the early-2030s production target.

Sources

• KoBold Metals: Breaking Ground at Mingomba: A New Chapter for the Copperbelt, 21 May 2026
• MINING.COM: KoBold starts work on $2.3B Zambia copper mine, 29 Apr 2026

Photo: Mine headgear on Zambia's Copperbelt. Per Arne Wilson, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.