The largest lithium exploration campaign in history is being guided by AI, in the DRC

KoBold Metals, backed by Bezos and Gates, uses AI and airborne sensing to track lithium pegmatites across more than 3,000 km² in the Manono region.

KoBold Metals, a mining company backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, is running what it describes as the largest lithium exploration campaign in history, with 13 licenses covering more than 3,000 km² in the Manono region of the Democratic Republic of Congo — an area known for high-grade lithium pegmatites.

The differentiator isn't the amount of data collected — 30,000 km² of airborne survey, thousands of drill holes, more than 30,000 geochemical samples — but the use of AI to decide where to drill next from that volume. Mineral exploration has traditionally been a slow funnel: each hole is expensive, and the decision of where to drill depends on human geological interpretation, hole by hole. AI models trained on multiple layers of geophysical and geochemical data compress that decision cycle, allowing more targets to be tested with the same drilling budget.

A year ago KoBold had no employees or land in the DRC; today it's the largest American investor in the country. That's also a geopolitical signal: AI-guided mineral exploration is being used as a fast-entry tool into countries with a mining history but where Western capital has traditionally hesitated. For exploration geologists, the skill that matters most has stopped being just interpreting a geological cross-section — it's also knowing how to train and validate the model that suggests where the next section should be cut.