Not so long ago, tattered old maps of Africa’s most remote mining regions would conjure up images of Allan Quatermain cutting his way deep into the jungle in search of King Solomon’s Mines.
Today they are still a gold mine and again a source of conflict—for the way they can minimize geologists’ time in the jungle and better target what lies beneath, including by training artificial intelligence on what to look for.
Antique maps and other geological archives are at the heart of an increasingly ugly showdown between Belgium’s colonial museum and the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the center of the decades-old feud is an AI-driven mining company backed by Bill Gates.
Some of those contested documents, many of which map out remote areas of Congo, sit in Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa outside Brussels, which first opened in 1897 as the “Palace of the Colonies” and was host to a “human zoo” of central African people.
Caught in the middle is American mining company KoBold Metals, which uses AI to scour for copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt. Last year, the company signed an agreement with Congo to digitize the geological records at the Belgian museum and make them public, and to help drive investment—including its own—in Congo’s minerals sector.
Backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, among others, KoBold says machine learning allows it to collect and analyze more sophisticated data about deposits than conventional exploration methods. Last year, it attained a valuation of $2.96 billion and recently finished two years of digitizing maps and other documents from the state archives in neighboring Zambia, where it hit pay dirt.
KoBold probed deeper underground than others had looked and discovered a vast deposit of high-grade copper. It plans to sink the mine’s first shaft this year, and hopes to repeat similar success in Congo. The Zambian government also made the maps available for anyone else who wants to use them.
The Belgian museum, which holds what is widely regarded as the world’s leading collection of Central African art and objects, isn’t so keen. It has run various projects to digitize and share the archives publicly before, which have resulted in incomplete, outdated and user-unfriendly databases, but still says it wants to do it itself.
Museum director-general Bart Ouvry said a new effort to digitize its archives commenced at the start of February, building on past work to create a homogenized data set.
“We made very clear to [KoBold] that we had a project ongoing already, and being a public institution, that we did not believe it was a good option to have a private company that oversees the management of the complete body of archives,” when that company has commercial interests directly related to the content of the archives, Ouvry said.
He said the museum also wants the records, which aren’t yet available online, to be openly accessible once digitized, though it would only do so with Congo’s permission. Congolese government officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“The only entity that should be deciding how their data is digitized and managed is the government of the DRC,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “They should be making the final decision on who their partner is.”
Baskaran added that the Congolese mining cadastre, a digital public system used by governments to manage mineral rights, concessions and licenses, is actually quite good. “We need to build on the robustness of what is one of the better systems in the region,” she said. “Ultimately, the Belgians deciding what is best for the DRC is unhelpful.”
To Jef Caers, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Stanford University who happens to be Belgian, the museum’s stance looks like “delay tactics.”
Caers founded the Stanford Mineral-X Initiative, a collection of professors and students who use AI to help mining companies improve drilling outcomes, to which KoBold is a minor donor. Caers said he has no financial ties to KoBold, nor does he perform paid consulting or have sponsored research projects with them.
“They’ve had decades to make an inventory,” he said of the museum.
KoBold, meanwhile, is in the process of digitizing archives at the University of Lubumbashi in Congo and has signed an agreement to also digitize documents for neighboring Burundi.
“At the very least, [Belgium] should give [Congo] a digital library of [its] own history,” said Melissa Sanderson, a former diplomat who lived in Congo for nearly a decade and who is co-chairwoman of the Toronto-based Critical Minerals Institute. “It’s not as if KoBold is doing something Congo doesn’t want done, which asks the question, why is the museum upset?”
The spat is emerging as a source of frustration in Congo, which already holds a historic grudge with its old colonial ruler. Belgium ruled a large area of central Africa for 75 years until 1960 under a notoriously brutal colonial regime. The museum, set in a leafy Brussels suburb, holds millions of documents containing geological data that could significantly speed up mineral exploration in Congo. Among the archives are brittle and faded hand-drawn field maps plus more than 150,000 soil and rock samples.
Paired with modern airborne methods, the old maps can help target and reduce the cost of subsurface mapping—especially due to the difficulty and expense of operating in modern-day Congo.
The size of Western Europe, Congo suffers from poor infrastructure, limited skilled labor, violence in its war-torn east and a reputation for government corruption. Only about 5% of Congo is mapped with modern techniques, said Caers.
“There’s a 95% hole. Anything that can help fill this up can help modern exploration,” he said.
International mining companies have previously commissioned and paid for reports from the archives. But even with original documents, said François Kervyn de Meerendré, the Belgian museum’s head of geology, “it’s not a magic recipe where you find maps for lithium or gold. It gives you some indication.”
That argument misses the point, says Caers, who notes that Belgium took the archives after independence, when they should have become Congolese state property.
Caers says that KoBold is best positioned to put the Congolese archives online and bring investment to the impoverished country. “It has the latest, greatest technology. It can create content that is decision-ready. The museum can’t,” he said.
“We need these things fast,” Caers said. “This is not about handing over a bunch of art.”
Write to Alexandra Wexler at alexandra.wexler@wsj.com