On September 14th, in a signing ceremony in Baku attended by President Ilham Aliyev and Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security adviser and deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates put their names to a stack of agreements spanning renewable energy, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and gas. Buried in that stack, and easy to miss beside the higher-wattage AI headlines, was a single mining accord: AzerGold, Azerbaijan's state precious-metals company, agreeing to jointly evaluate and explore mineral potential across the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic with Terra Mining, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi's International Resources Holding (IRH).

The statement is a relatively modest one - a template for geological surveys, not for a mine, let alone for a mining license. Yet compared to the recent activities of its counterpart, it seems more like an initial bid than just some sort of formality.

Now, one of the important points is that here is IRH's portfolio, where you can see that they don't engage in many small deals.

In March 2024, it bought out a 51% interest in Mopani Copper Mines in Zambia – the biggest copper mine employer in the country, aiming to produce 200,000 tonnes of copper cathodes within three years. Fourteen months after that, it took an additional $367m to purchase a majority........

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