Not just the prize: How Africa is shaping the China-US race for critical minerals

Africa sits at the center of an intensifying contest over the world's critical mineral supply chains. From the Copperbelt (the copper-rich mining belt spanning the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and northern Zambia) to the DRC's cobalt fields and Zimbabwe's lithium deposits, mining projects once valued mainly for raw material potential have acquired wider strategic significance, and increasingly are viewed through the prism of supply security and geopolitical influence.

China has established a substantial presence across this landscape over the past two decades, combining mine ownership with financing, processing capacity and infrastructure. The US is pursuing commercial partnerships, development finance and diplomacy instead. Their competition now plays out not only in acquiring mining assets, but in the architecture that determines where minerals are processed, how they reach global markets, and who captures the value.

But Africa is not simply the prize in this contest. Its governments are increasingly shaping the terms of access to their resources, using regulatory power, state participation and industrial policy to influence who invests, what leaves the country, and how much value is captured by African primary producers.

The Chinese ownership model

China has spent a generation playing the long game: large-scale, state-coordinated investments built up over time. A classic example is in the DRC, where China Molybdenum (CMOC) operates the prized Tenke Fungurume mine (once majority-owned by US-based Freeport-McMoRan) and the Kisanfu mine, acquired through transactions financed by Chinese state-owned banks between 2016 and 2019. Other classic examples include: MMG's acquisition of 100 per cent of Khoemacau, the Botswana copper mine; and in Zambia, where JCHX Mining acquired 80 percent of the Lubambe copper mine in 2024.

Asset by asset, the pattern repeats: majority stakes, patient Chinese capital, long-term control.

Lithium tells the same story. Zimbabwe's Arcadia and Bikita mines are majority owned by Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt and Sinomine Resource Group respectively, together accounting for approximately 80 percent of Africa's lithium output, with several other Chinese companies having invested billions more across Zimbabwe's mines and processing plants. Wherever African lithium is mined, Chinese capital is already there.

Chinese investment does not stop at the mine gate:

a. Zijin holds a 60 percent stake in the neighboring Lualaba smelter through China Nonferrous Metal Mining (CNMC);

b. The Zijin-invested Kamoa-Kakula complex is commissioning Africa's largest copper smelter (500,000 tonnes-per-annum capacity), converting concentrate into blister copper locally;

c. China also finances the infrastructure moving the product: In September 2025, it signed a US$1.4 billion deal with Zambia and Tanzania to rehabilitate the Tazara railway, linking the Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam — control not just of the resource, but of the route to market.

In contrast, the United States' offtake model

The United States' direct investment footprint in African mineral supply chains remains thin. Western mining houses once held substantial equity across the Copperbelt, but most of that has since been sold down, nationalized, or ceded to Chinese and other buyers. The US is now deepening both its financial commitments and diplomatic engagement.

So what does the renewed US strategy look like? A mix of private investment, government-backed financing, diplomacy and contracts. The Lobito Corridor — a rail line linking the DRC and Zambian Copperbelt to Angola's port of Lobito, backed by the US and the EU — is pitched as an alternative to Chinese-controlled export routes.

In December 2025, the US and the DRC signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement reportedly granting US companies a right of first offer on designated critical mineral deposits — a contractual priority, not ownership. In September 2026, cabinet minutes reviewed by Reuters showed Kinshasa had formally approved a "DRC-USA Task Force" to accelerate the bilateral minerals deal.

The DRC's state cobalt entity, Entreprise Générale de Cobalt (EGC), shows this model in action: In May 2026, it agreed to supply cobalt hydroxide to US-based EVelution Energy, with Trafigura handling logistics — a government-brokered arrangement rather than an equity investment.

A parallel structure is taking shape around Gécamines, the state miner, paired with Mercuria, in a metals-trading joint venture. The Development Finance Corporation (DFC) has issued a letter of intent to invest — a step further than arm's-length commodity contracts, though still short of direct mine ownership.

Could Washington go direct?

There are early signs that US-aligned capital is edging toward direct ownership, borrowing from China's own playbook. The most notable move came in February 2026, when Glencore announced a non-binding memorandum of understanding for the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, backed by the DFC and Gulf investor ADQ, to acquire a 40 percent stake in its Mutanda Mining and Kamoto Copper Company interests.

Glencore would keep managing the assets; Orion CMC would gain governance rights and the ability to direct its share of production to US-nominated buyers, and is reportedly pursuing similarly structured deals elsewhere in the region.

A more provocative question remains unconfirmed: Could Washington go further and take direct equity stakes itself, government-to-government, rather than routing everything through the DFC and private consortia? If the US government were ever to hold equity outright in an African mine, that could be the moment the strategies of the US and China largely converged.

Recent US-linked (and US/allied-backed) financing in African critical minerals

_{Sources: Botswana Mining Report (8/14/2026), Liberia Mining Report (7/3/2026), Political Risk Weekly: US Rare Earths Moves, Iran Update, DRC-Rwanda Tensions And Ebola (5/29/2026)}

Are African governments now masterminding play in the mineral resources sector? Spotlight on the DRC

African governments are now actively shaping the terms of engagement, leveraging resource nationalism to extract greater value from their resources.

The DRC shows what this looks like when it works. Cobalt prices had fallen from around US$82,000 per tonne in April 2022 to roughly US$21,550 in February 2025 — so Kinshasa simply stopped selling, imposing a full export ban between February and October 2025, then moving to a quota capping exports at 96,600 tonnes a year through to 2027.

In August 2026 it banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrates outright, with one-year waivers for operators able to show strategic or technical justification. Concentrates made up around 13 percent of the DRC's copper exports in 2025, according to BMI. The ban's direct market impact likely is modest, but the signal to investors is not: Cobalt hydroxide prices were roughly four times higher by August 2026 than before the ban began, according to Fastmarkets. Kinshasa moved the market by simply refusing to sell to it. Zimbabwe took a similar approach on lithium, suspending all raw mineral and concentrate exports, including cargo already in transit, on February 25, 2026, citing sector malpractices. The suspension was lifted in April on strict conditions – producers must commit to build local beneficiation facilities and commission lithium sulphate plants by January 1, 2027, when a full ban on unprocessed concentrate exports takes effect — alongside a 10 percent export tax on concentrate shipments in the meantime. By May, Zimbabwe had shipped its first lithium sulphate cargo from the China-backed Arcadia mine, marking Africa's entry into higher-value lithium processing.

Can African governments keep this up? Fastmarkets reported the DRC shipped less than half its allocated cobalt hydroxide quota for Q4 2025, owing to paperwork delays and a bridge collapse on a key export route.

BMI analysts warn the quota raises costs for battery manufacturers, pushing them to reduce cobalt intensity, so the DRC's leverage will erode as supply expands — notably where cobalt is recovered as a by-product of nickel processing, giving manufacturers alternative sources outside Africa.

This is the uncomfortable part of being kingmaker: The DRC dictated the terms and the price moved, but a bridge collapse still cost it half a quarter's quota, and unreliable power, thin logistics and administrative capacity constrain beneficiation just as much as they constrain exports. Leverage that cannot be reliably executed erodes — so it must be actively worked, not just declared, and both China and the US know it.

So how does the DRC, and others following its lead, keep this working? By turning competition between Beijing and Washington into a negotiating tool rather than a binary choice, the DRC is elevating its standing in global mineral supply chains. Kinshasa has sent Washington a shortlist of 44 state-linked projects open to American investment while simultaneously renegotiating, rather than abandoning, its Chinese partnerships — using Washington's concern over Chinese-controlled cobalt to seek better terms. DRC Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner calls this "complementarity" rather than competition, keeping both powers engaged. Zambia applies the same logic at the asset level: ZCCM-IH has used a shareholder transition to lift its stake in Lubambe from 20 to 30 percent — gains negotiated commercially rather than funded by fresh state capital. The pattern across both countries is the same: rather than betting on a single patron, African governments are using rival external demand as leverage to negotiate better financing, bigger equity stakes and more favorable offtake terms.

Could beneficiation decide the whole contest?

Neither ownership nor offtake may be the variable that decides this contest, it may be whichever power helps African governments build the electricity and processing capacity they need. Africa's mineral endowment is estimated at US$29.5 trillion in mine-site value, about one-fifth of the global total, but mine-gate and processed value: in aluminum, mining captures only approx. 30 percent of chain value, processing the rest. Zimbabwe illustrates the shift: Lithium export earnings reached US$782 million in the first half of 2026, more than triple the US$237 million a year earlier, driven mainly by processing rather than extra ore.
Infrastructure makes a restriction enforceable; beneficiation is what it is ultimately for. A government can hold the line on exports with the right power, rail and ports, but only if a processing industry sits behind it. The policy shift is no longer aspirational:

a. Zimbabwe has made beneficiation binding law, targeting an increase in lithium-related revenue from roughly US$571 million to US$4.61 billion via a Value-Added Compliance Certificate regime and real-time export tracking. Zambia is enforcing 20 to 40 percent local procurement quotas, and the DRC's revised Mining Code now takes equity directly from foreign investors — different tools serving the same instinct to capture more value onshore.

b. Sovereign capital is backing this shift too. Angola's sovereign wealth fund has co-financed Pensana's Longonjo beneficiation project, which is expected to supply up to five percent of global magnet metals once operational, and Senegal and Ethiopia are funding their own refining projects. None of this is Chinese or American money — it is African capital betting that value sits in processing, not the ore itself.

What would this look like in practice? Not simply another export ban. Industry voices in Zimbabwe stress that reliable electricity, patient capital, investor incentives and clear timelines matter as much as the restriction itself, with power shortages being the biggest constraint on turning policy into revenue. The government that credibly solves that problem — not the one that owns the most mines or signs the most contracts — may be this contest's more durable winner.

The next frontiers

The DRC-Zambia-Zimbabwe belt is the core of this contest, but it is not where the story ends. The project pipeline points to a broader set of markets: bauxite in Guinea; graphite in Madagascar; rare earths in Malawi, Tanzania, Angola and South Africa; and manganese in Gabon.

Madagascar deserves attention: The US Development Finance Corporation has already committed financing to Harena Rare Earths' Ampasindava project, one of the largest ionic-clay rare earth deposits outside China, as part of Washington's push to diversify away from Chinese refining. It is early-stage and small in dollar terms, but a live test of whether the US playbook can take root where China has not yet locked down.

So what comes next?

China and the US have pursued genuinely different models: ownership and vertical integration on one side, offtake agreements and government-backed financing on the other. But the lines are starting to blur.

African governments, meanwhile, have not stood still. Export bans, quotas and beneficiation requirements have moved the DRC and Zimbabwe from hosting the contest to actively negotiating its terms, and playing Beijing and Washington against each other for better financing and equity terms has become a deliberate strategy — both powers have had to adjust their offers as a result.

But this shift in bargaining position still falls short of control. The processing capacity, power supply and institutional frameworks needed to make export restrictions stick are still being built, and reliance on Chinese refining capacity and financing limits how far resource nationalism alone can rebalance power.

No single metric will decide who holds the overall advantage. China's ownership base took two decades to build and remains formidable. What Zimbabwe's lithium sector and the DRC's copper-refining build-out both show is that the country capturing the most value is the one that gets processing done at home — not the one that mines the most ore, signs the most contracts, or simply takes a bigger equity stake in projects that still ship raw material abroad. If that pattern holds, the more useful question may not be how much equity China and the US hold, or how many tonnes they are contracted to buy. It may be whether their investment model can survive a host government that keeps raising the price of admission.

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