Mingomba: a century of geologists, a century of data, and the machine that read it all at once

Mingomba is in Chililabombwe District, Copperbelt Province, Zambia. Close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Ming’omba stream runs nearby. It gives nothing away about what lies below. The indigenous Lamba people of the area have mined copper from this earth since the seventeenth century.

They found it where it came to surface. Mingomba never did.

The ground has passed through a longer chain of hands than any single company’s story would suggest. The Konkola North property carried an old shaft, Konkola No. 2, sunk by Anglo American in the 1960s and flooded soon after when the ore body proved inconsistent — an early false start on ground that would take another sixty years to give up its metal.

Anglovaal took up the property next, through its Zambian subsidiary Konnoco, holding Konkola North from 1996 and running a significant drilling programme through the late 1990s. Those holes extended into what would eventually become Mingomba and continued downdip into what was then called Block A, drilled as far as the Lubengele stream, the property’s northern boundary with Konkola Copper Mines.

African Rainbow Minerals absorbed the position when it acquired Anglovaal’s mining assets, and Konnoco’s interests passed into TEAL Exploration and Mining Corporation, which listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in November 2005 with ARM holding approximately 66%. ARM and Vale then bought out the minority shareholders and took TEAL private, delisting it in 2009 as the two companies established a 50:50 joint venture to develop the Lubambe mine, working the East and South limbs of the Konkola Dome from surface down to approximately 550 metres.

EMR Capital acquired the ARM and Vale stakes in 2017 for $97 million. Each owner left data behind. None sank a shaft into the deep extension.

Between 2019 and 2021, geologists Jon Stacey and Elijah Mwelwa took up that unfinished work, drilling the Lubambe Extension ground on a constrained budget. Four holes beyond 1,500 metres, each adding roughly ten million tonnes to what was already known — fifty million tonnes in total. Their work produced a JORC-compliant resource and a preliminary economic assessment substantial enough, in Stacey’s own words, to bring KoBold and other bidders to the table. They honoured everything the previous generations had left in the archive, and drilled deeper than any of them had gone.

In 2022, KoBold Metals made a $150 million investment and renamed the project Mingomba. KoBold is a Berkeley, California-based machine-learning company backed by investors including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Andreessen Horowitz, and BHP Ventures. Their TerraShed platform normalised a century of exploration records, spatially aligned them to common coordinates, and built a three-dimensional model of the subsurface from more data than any human brain can hold at once.

Not new data. All of the historical data, read simultaneously for the first time.

They drilled against model uncertainty rather than on a grid.

KoBold’s internal estimate: 247 million tonnes at 3.64% copper, on par with Kamoa-Kakula in the DRC in grade and class. This figure is not yet JORC or NI 43-101 compliant. No independent Qualified Person or Competent Person report has been published. The New York Times reviewed KoBold’s projections and a separate independent assessment, both confirming the scale.

Copper above $13,000 a tonne. Powered by the energy transition. KoBold broke ground on 29 April 2026. Shaft sinking: early 2027. Capex: $2.3 to $2.5 billion. First production: early 2030s. Three hundred thousand tonnes per annum.

ZCCM-IH holds a 20% stake in Mingomba Mining Limited alongside KoBold, with Zambia’s state investment vehicle actively working to raise that position to 25%.

The shaft is not being built alone. The Zambia spur of the Lobito Corridor, roughly 500 kilometres of greenfield railway terminating at Chingola, is currently in contractor evaluation, with nine international EPC contractors having submitted bids in May 2026 and construction expected to begin by late 2026 or early 2027, completion targeted for the early 2030s. Mingomba sits nineteen kilometres from that terminus, near Chililabombwe. The timing is not coincidental. In December 2024, at a summit co-hosted by President Biden and Angola’s President Lourenço, the Africa Finance Corporation announced an MOU naming KoBold as anchor client for the entire Zambia-Lobito railway, committing to a minimum of 300,000 tonnes of copper and related freight a year — Mingomba’s full planned output, formally pledged as the commercial foundation of the rail line. The shaft and the railway are being built because the other one exists. Both timed to open in the early 2030s.

Sinking a 1,700-metre shaft and holding a $2.5 billion project together is another discipline entirely. The Copperbelt has a long memory for companies that arrived confident and left quietly. The work still lies ahead.

Set against the wider basin, the number is smaller than it sounds.

In 1979, Zambia and Chile produced roughly the same volume of copper: around 680,000 tonnes each. By 2025, Chile produced 5.3 million tonnes to Zambia’s 890,000. The gap isn’t geological — Chilean porphyry ore runs at 0.5 to 1.0% copper, well below Mingomba’s grade. The more instructive comparator is the DRC, sharing the same basin and the same geology: around a million tonnes of production in 2010, overtaking Peru as the world’s second-largest copper producer by 2023, and more than 3 million tonnes in 2024. That is what a changed investment climate does to a Copperbelt deposit.

Zambia’s own target of 3 million tonnes by 2031 is less an ambition than a return to a scale the country once held. The USGS estimates 152 million tonnes of known copper resource across more than eighty deposits in the Central African Copperbelt, with a further 168 million tonnes estimated undiscovered. Most of it is still in the ground.

In September 2025, Zambia launched the GSD Digital Store, a searchable repository of exploration records from the 1920s to the present — the same century of records Anglo, Konnoco, ARM, TEAL, Vale, and EMR each added to and passed on without ever reading it whole. The mineral rights over this ground trace back further still, to the BSAC Royal Charter of the 1890s. The BSAC gave up political control of Northern Rhodesia in 1923 but retained those mineral rights until Zambian independence in 1964. Every owner in the chain left records. KoBold built a tool that could hold and read all of them at once.

The Lamba found copper where it broke surface. Every generation that followed drilled deeper. Jon Stacey and Elijah Mwelwa drilled the deepest, on the tightest budget, and built the foundation the deal was built on.

The Ming’omba stream will still be there when the shaft goes down. Dark and slow and entirely indifferent. The ground gave nothing away for a century. What changed was not the ground and not the ore. What changed was the instrument.

Kevin Lester is Legal Executive and founder of SkyBlue Africa Advisory, and previously served for many years as General Counsel for Anglo American’s upstream businesses across South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. This article is part of his ongoing #MiningisHuman series, available to read on Kevin's LinkedIn or Substack. 

Kevin will be speaking at the inaugural Zambia Edition of the GC Forum Extractives, themed "Structuring Growth in a New Extractives Era", to be held in Livingstone, Zambia on 29 September 2026. For more information, visit here. 

This event is free to attend for mining and energy GCs and in-house legal teams; mining and energy professionals in leadership, risk, and compliance roles; government relations, policy and regulatory professionals; investors and financiers in the mining and energy sectors; NGOs and academia. To attend please register here.

For more information about this GC Forum Extractives event, including speaker slots, sponsorship, and attendance, please contact Scott Cowan on scott@africa-legal.com