The Muruntau mine, one of the largest gold mines in the world, located in the mountains of Murintau in the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan. Photo by Oleksandr Goncharenko.

Washington needs secure supplies of uranium, tungsten, and copper that are less vulnerable to Chinese control, and Uzbekistan happens to be sitting on an estimated $3 trillion in mineral wealth. That has turned the formerly isolated Central Asian state into an unlikely darling of American mineral strategists, and its government is continuing to dismantle decades of economic protectionism and state control in hopes of cashing in.

But the mineral rush is arriving fast, and it’s bringing old problems with it. Corruption has not gone away. Nor has the state’s appetite for repression diminished. Meanwhile, punishing water scarcity is only worsening as extraction ramps up.

The question is who actually profits from Uzbekistan’s new extractive economy—and who ends up paying for it.

“Often times, I’m really confused what leads what—geopolitics leads the direction of the critical minerals supply chain, or sometimes, the critical minerals supply chain leads geopolitics,” said Khan Ilhan, strategic advisor to the Uzbekistan Technological Metals Company (TMK), during the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada Convention in downtown Toronto this past March

Whichever direction the relationship runs, Ilhan is betting that it ends in a cartel. He sees a critical-mineral OPEC taking shape: the proposed Organization of Mineral Exporting Countries (OMEC) would mirror OPEC’s oil market structure, uniting resource-rich nations to manage global supply chains. TMK, a significant driver of that proposed alliance, sits at the heart of Uzbekistan’s dramatic push for mineral industrialization and favourable fiscal reforms.

Uzbekistan’s vast mineral ambitions mark a sharp departure from its historic reliance on agricultural exports such as cotton and pistachios and are increasingly geared toward supplying foreign industrial and defence sectors. During a February meeting, Donald Trump and Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev agreed to deepen cooperation on critical minerals, as Tashkent simultaneously unveiled plans for $2.6 billion in investments across 76 projects involving 28 strategic minerals over the next three years. The initiatives form part of Uzbekistan’s broader effort to position itself as a major supplier of critical minerals at a time when Washington is seeking to reduce its dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains and build strategic reserves through initiatives such as “Project Vault.”

Mirziyoyev created TMK in 2024 to concentrate critical mineral assets across the country under one vertically integrated company. It was a huge undertaking: consolidating more than 100 active projects spanning 25 commodities, with a specific focus on the Samarkand and Tashkent regions. By integrating extraction, research and development, raw-material processing, and manufacturing under one company, Uzbekistan is adopting a model increasingly common in the mining industry.

In 2022, Mirziyoyev welcomed the “active participation” of the Boston Consulting Group “to optimize the management program for large enterprises,” as Uzbekistan strategized the privatization of state-owned enterprises. TMK also worked with BCG to identify “focus materials,” namely tungsten and molybdenum, which are both critical for the aerospace and defence industries.

Soviet-era exploration data offered a starting point for understanding what minerals are in the ground, but the current government wants state-backed companies such as TMK to expand the country’s geoscience data repository. “We will be competing with the Ministry of Geology in that regard,” TMK advisor and mining expert Mike Beare told business leaders in Toronto. “Our mandate is to develop the minerals in Uzbekistan for the good of the country, and I’ll leave the politics to others.”

New mineral discoveries reach from eastern Uzbekistan into Kyrgyzstan, Beare said, referring to the region as “a part of the world where two of the largest gold mines, and one of the largest copper mines, are situated.” In the heart of the Kyzylkum Desert, Muruntau is the biggest open-pit gold mine in the world, while Almalyk, near the border with Tajikistan,........

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