The New Scramble for Africa: US vs China in the $10 Billion Infrastructure Race for Critical Minerals

Two multi-billion-dollar rail projects in Africa. One headed west, the other east. One backed by Western governments, the other by China. Both designed to ship vast quantities of critical minerals from the heart of the continent to global markets. Welcome to the new scramble for Africa — a twenty-first-century competition not for territory but for the geological resources that will power the energy transition, the AI revolution, and the defense industrial base of every major economy on Earth.

The Lobito Corridor, backed by more than $10 billion in commitments from the United States, European Union, and allied institutions, will transport copper and cobalt from the DRC and Zambia westward to Angola’s Atlantic coast. China’s counter-project, a $1.4 billion revival of the TAZARA railway, will carry the same minerals eastward from Zambia to Tanzania’s Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam. The two corridors represent competing visions not just for logistics routes but for the future of African development, the structure of global supply chains, and the balance of power between East and West.

The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment

The Lobito Corridor is the flagship project of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), a G7 initiative launched by President Biden at the 2023 G7 Summit in Hiroshima. PGII was explicitly conceived as a Western alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which had spent the previous decade deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure financing across the developing world — frequently on terms that critics described as debt traps designed to secure Chinese strategic leverage.

The U.S. commitment to the Lobito Corridor has been sustained across administrations. The Biden administration announced over $4 billion in total investments, culminating in Biden’s historic December 2024 visit to Angola — the first presidential visit to Sub-Saharan Africa in years. The Trump administration, rather than abandoning the project, has embraced it as an instrument of supply chain security. DFC CEO Ben Black described the $553 million loan signing as characterizing President Trump’s commitment to strong partnerships in Africa. The February 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial Summit, attended by seven African nations, launched Project FORGE (Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement) and Project Vault, a nearly $12 billion critical mineral stockpiling initiative.

This bipartisan continuity reflects a rare point of agreement in American politics: the recognition that China’s dominance over critical mineral supply chains represents a strategic vulnerability that transcends partisan ideology. China controls 70–80 percent of global cobalt refining, dominates battery manufacturing, and has used its position in mineral supply chains to exercise economic coercion against countries that cross its geopolitical red lines. Diversifying these supply chains is not a Democratic or Republican priority — it is a national security imperative.

China’s African Infrastructure Legacy

China’s engagement with African infrastructure predates the Belt and Road Initiative by decades, but BRI formalized and accelerated it. In Angola specifically, China invested $2 billion in rebuilding the Benguela Railway under an oil-for-infrastructure arrangement — loans repaid through Angolan oil exports. The rebuild restored operational continuity to the railway but suffered from quality problems that diminished its effectiveness as a commercial logistics route.

More strategically significant than the railway itself is China’s mining footprint. Chinese companies have systematically acquired control over the DRC’s most productive mines through a combination of direct investment, joint ventures with state-owned enterprises, and acquisitions of Western mining companies. CMOC (China Molybdenum) controls both Kisanfu and Tenke Fungurume, the two largest cobalt producers in the world. Zijin Mining holds a controlling stake in Ivanhoe Mines, which operates the Kamoa-Kakula copper complex. Chinese-linked entities have worked to control regional transportation systems and restrict access to U.S. and allied businesses.

The TAZARA railway revival represents China’s logistical counter-move. The 1,860-kilometer line, originally built as a Cold War-era project in the 1970s with Chinese labor and financing, connects Zambia’s Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam. China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation announced a $1.4 billion investment to rehabilitate the line, which had deteriorated significantly from decades of underinvestment. The revived TAZARA would provide an eastward alternative to the westward Lobito route — ensuring that even if Western investment creates an Atlantic corridor, Chinese-controlled mines would retain access to Indian Ocean shipping routes.

The DRC Battlefield

The DRC is the epicenter of the competition. The country’s mineral wealth is so vast — an estimated $24 trillion in untapped resources — that control over its supply chains has become a first-order geopolitical priority for both Washington and Beijing. The US-DRC strategic partnership, signed in 2024, seeks to ensure minerals are managed responsibly for the long-term benefit of both nations. The Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, a US-government backed mining investment fund, announced plans in early 2026 to acquire a 40 percent stake in Glencore’s Mutanda Mining and Kamoto Copper Company, valuing the operations at approximately $9 billion.

Lualaba Province Governor Fifi Masuka Saini has articulated the DRC’s position: the country does not work with a single partner. Europeans are present, as are Asians and African investors. What matters is respect for Congolese laws and contribution to local development. This pragmatic multi-alignment strategy — welcoming investment from all sources while asserting regulatory sovereignty — reflects a growing sophistication in African resource diplomacy that neither Washington nor Beijing can take for granted.

Europe’s Third Way

The European Union’s engagement adds a third dimension to the competition. The EU’s Global Gateway strategy, with more than €2 billion committed to the Lobito Corridor, is formally aligned with the American PGII initiative but reflects distinctly European priorities. Where the U.S. emphasis under both Biden and Trump has been on supply chain security and mineral access, the EU combines resource access with development programming: agricultural value chains, vocational training, renewable energy, and governance reform.

This approach creates both synergies and tensions with the American strategy. The transatlantic alignment on the corridor’s strategic importance provides combined financial firepower that no single investor could match. But the EU’s insistence on environmental and social standards, while laudable, can slow project execution relative to Chinese competitors who typically impose fewer conditions. The European Council on Foreign Relations has warned that without faster capital deployment and greater risk acceptance, Europe risks becoming a credible announcer but an unreliable deliverer — undermining the very partnership model the Lobito Corridor is designed to showcase.

The Minerals Security Partnership and Project FORGE

The Lobito Corridor does not exist in isolation but as the most visible component of a broader American critical minerals strategy that has accelerated dramatically under both the Biden and Trump administrations. The Minerals Security Partnership (MSP), launched in 2022 with 14 partner countries and the EU, aims to strengthen critical mineral supply chains through coordinated investment and policy alignment. The MSP has directed over $200 million into African mining projects, focusing on infrastructure development, responsible sourcing, and local battery production in collaboration with the DRC and Zambia.

Trump’s February 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial Summit escalated the strategic framework further. Project Vault, a nearly $12 billion critical mineral stockpiling initiative, signals American willingness to build physical reserves of minerals currently dominated by Chinese suppliers — a direct parallel to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve but for the materials of the energy transition. Project FORGE (Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement), launched at the same summit, creates an institutional framework for coordinating mineral supply chain partnerships across allied nations. Seven African countries attended the summit, including the DRC and Zambia, invited to form what Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as a trading bloc among allies and partners.

The Orion Critical Mineral Consortium represents perhaps the most aggressive American move yet into African mining. The US-government backed fund’s planned acquisition of a 40 percent stake in Glencore’s Mutanda Mining and Kamoto Copper Company — valuing the DRC operations at approximately $9 billion — would give American-aligned investors direct ownership of major copper and cobalt production. Washington is simultaneously pushing for a US takeover of Chemaf, another DRC-based mining company. These acquisitions, if completed, would begin to reverse the pattern of Chinese mining dominance that has characterized the DRC for over a decade.

The TAZARA Counter-Move

China’s response to the Lobito Corridor has been strategic and measured. Rather than attempting to compete on the western Atlantic route, Beijing has focused on strengthening its eastern Indian Ocean alternative. The Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA), originally built between 1970 and 1975 with Chinese financing and labor as a gesture of Cold War solidarity with newly independent African states, had deteriorated severely from decades of underinvestment. China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation’s $1.4 billion rehabilitation commitment would restore the 1,860-kilometer line linking Zambia’s Copperbelt to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam.

The TAZARA revival creates a dual-corridor architecture for Copperbelt mineral exports. Mining operations would have westward access to the Atlantic via Lobito and eastward access to the Indian Ocean via Dar es Salaam. For Chinese-owned mines — which constitute the majority of DRC operations — this ensures that Western control of the Lobito route does not create a transport bottleneck or leverage point. For Zambian producers, competition between the two corridors could drive down transport costs and improve service quality. For the DRC and Zambia, having two major export corridors backed by competing great powers maximizes their strategic options and negotiating leverage.

The geopolitical symbolism is unmistakable. Both the original Benguela Railway and the original TAZARA were products of imperial and Cold War competition for African resources and allegiance. Their simultaneous rehabilitation, backed by the same competing powers under different institutional arrangements, confirms that Africa’s mineral wealth has once again become a primary arena of great power competition — with the critical difference that African nations now have significantly more agency in determining the terms of engagement.

Strategic Assessment

The competition for Africa’s critical minerals is not a zero-sum game, though it is frequently described as one. Chinese-owned mines will likely use the Western-funded Lobito Corridor alongside Western mining operations — a pragmatic coexistence that defies neat geopolitical categorizations. The DRC and Zambia benefit from competitive investment from multiple sources, using their geological leverage to extract better terms from all suitors. Angola benefits from its position as the corridor’s gateway, regardless of which nation’s mines the minerals originate from.

The deeper risk is that the competition for minerals overwhelms the commitment to development. If the corridor becomes primarily a vehicle for more efficient extraction — whether by Western or Chinese companies — the African nations at its center will have exchanged one form of resource dependency for another. The test of whether this scramble for Africa differs from its predecessors will be measured not in tonnes of copper shipped but in jobs created, value chains established, refineries built, and communities developed along the corridor’s path.