Beyond Energy: Why AI’s Material Backbone Matters — and Why Africa Must Be Central to Any Sustainable AI Strategy

Source: enb.iisd.org

At this week’s United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA7) in Nairobi, leaders will explore how to balance the benefits from Artificial Intelligence (AI) with its planetary footprint.

This aside, there are already ongoing debates about how the sustainability of artificial intelligence tends to focus on energy use — the enormous electricity demands of training large models and the water needed for cooling. Energy tells only part of the story. Beneath every AI system sits a vast, mostly invisible network of minerals and materials: cobalt, copper, nickel, manganese, rare earths, silicon, and the semiconductors that bind them together. These resources shape ecological outcomes and global power dynamics just as profoundly as AI’s hunger for electricity (IEA, 2023).

What makes materials so crucial today is the geopolitical context. Supply chains for critical minerals are heavily concentrated. A few actors dominate semiconductor fabrication; China controls key stages of rare-earth processing; and political tensions have made export restrictions more common (Miller & Jones, 2022). In this environment, the minerals that enable AI are not simply commodities — they are strategic assets with the capacity to influence global power balances.

Africa sits at the centre of this conversation. The continent hosts some of the world’s most significant deposits of the minerals essential for batteries, datacentres and semiconductor components. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone supplies more than 70% of global cobalt demand. Southern and Eastern Africa also hold rising reserves of graphite, manganese, rare earths and platinum-group metals (African Union, 2023). Yet mineral-rich communities often bear the burdens of extraction — land degradation, water contamination, and unsafe labour conditions — while capturing only a fraction of the economic value.

This tension points to a bigger question: Is Sustainable AI possible if its hardware supply chain remains socially and environmentally costly, particularly in Africa? The short answer is yes — but only with a clearer and more responsible industrial strategy.

First, AI developers must integrate material transparency and “design-for-circularity” principles. Hardware should be modular, repairable, and built with disclosed sources of minerals. This aligns with Africa’s own push for local value addition under the African Mining Vision (AU, 2009), which calls for beneficiation, ethical sourcing, and stronger accountability in mineral supply chains.

Second, global efforts to diversify and decarbonise mineral supply chains need to include Africa as an equal partner — not just a supplier of raw materials. Investments in refining, processing and component manufacturing on the continent would reduce dependence on single suppliers while generating skilled jobs. Countries like Rwanda, South Africa and Namibia are already developing critical minerals strategies aimed at capturing more value domestically (UNCTAD, 2024).

Third, a Sustainable AI future requires circularity at scale. Urban mining, e-waste recovery and closed-loop recycling can drastically reduce demand for new extraction. Africa, which receives a disproportionate share of the world’s e-waste, can become a global hub for advanced recycling if supported with technology, finance and regulation. This would create new green industries while reducing environmental harm.

AI will inevitably reshape societies, but its sustainability will depend on what happens beneath the algorithms — in mines, factories and recycling plants across the world, including Africa. A credible Sustainable AI is possible, but only if we treat minerals not as afterthoughts, but as the moral and geopolitical foundation of the technology itself.

References

• African Union (2009). Africa Mining Vision.
• African Union (2023). Critical Minerals for Sustainable Industrialisation in Africa.
• IEA (2023). Critical Minerals Market Review.
• Miller, B. & Jones, T. (2022). Geopolitics of Critical Minerals.
• UNCTAD (2024). The Role of Critical Minerals in Africa’s Green Industrialisation.