The data colonialism of Big Tech is built on a much more familiar form of resource colonialism: mineral extraction. The current political acceptance of green capitalism affords ethical cover for new mining projects to resource energy transition technologies. Across sub-Saharan Africa mineral deposits originally identified by colonial geological surveys, and at the time deemed uneconomic, are now being drilled, mapped and mined to provide for energy transition in the economies of the Global North.

In the context of this global resource race, KoBold Metals are reproducing Big Tech’s data-colonialism in the field of geophysics. This Silicon Valley start-up whose funders include Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and venture capital firms, has developed two proprietary pieces of software: TerraShed and MachineProspector. The former is a repository of geophysical surveys, mineral maps and exploration data scraped from the public domain and purchased from private companies. The latter is an AI-driven prospecting tool trained on the accumulated data in TerraShed to model every possible ore body that could produce the signal recorded by a geophysical sensor. These softwares apply Big Tech’s familiar data-colonial playbook to the earth’s crust, aiming to monopolise the mineral mapping of the entire planet under the convenient guise of green extractivism.