The words came in a speech, and Gazeta.uz carried them at 20:00 Tashkent time: “I asked President Mirziyoyev this morning, in a one-to-one conversation, and he told me: one nuclear plant is being built with the Russians, another plant is being built with the Chinese, but this is not enough for me.” Belgrade's Alo carried the same account in Serbian 2 hours earlier: one nuclear plant Uzbekistan is building with the Russians, another with the Chinese, and that this is not enough for him.
Vučić's next sentence carries the mechanism. He said he understood how his guest had fought for the best price, and how cleverly he thinks about the future, because he knows what data centres, innovation, artificial intelligence and electric cars will need: electricity. A host's compliment, and a description of a buyer with two sellers in the room.
Kazakhstan's answer to the question of dependence was to double the dependence and split it.
What Tashkent has published is one plant. It sits near Lake Tuzkan in Jizzakh region's Farish district on about 525 hectares: two RITM-200N units of 55 MW each and two VVER-1000 units, about 2.1 GW together. Construction was launched on 4 June. The units are to enter service between 2029 and 2035 and to give about 15.2 billion kWh a year by 2035, roughly 15% of today's consumption, by Asia-Plus's account of the project. On 17 August in Khorezm Mirziyoyev added a sentence, prefaced as a secret: “We will soon begin major preparations for the second power plant,” in Asia-Plus's translation. No site, no capacity, no date, no partner.
China's paper with Uzatom is thinner than a plant. The agency signed a memorandum of cooperation with China National Nuclear Corporation Overseas, CNNC's overseas subsidiary, at a Samarkand conference on the peaceful atom, Nuclear Engineering International reported on 13 December 2024; its subjects were small-reactor expertise and uranium from mining to fuel. A memorandum names no reactor and no money. Since then the Jizzakh project has been the only nuclear item in Tashkent with figures attached: on 2 September Mirziyoyev set the local share at no less than 30%, up from 21%, in a project the readout priced at $9.5 billion, and on 4 September Uzatom proposed an engineering venture with a foreign partner, unnamed, to check the construction.
The pattern next door is a year old. In June 2025 Astana named Rosatom to lead the consortium for its first plant, at Ulken on Lake Balkhash, and CNNC to lead the consortium for a second. Two suppliers and two fuel chains. Kazakhstan's answer to the question of dependence was to double the dependence and split it. Vučić's account puts Tashkent on the same road a year behind, with the second plant's paperwork still unpublished.
What the formula buys is a price. A single supplier with a state credit line writes the tariff; a second supplier in the corridor turns the credit line into a bid, which is the fight Vučić described. What it costs is the rest of the machine twice over: two fuel-supply contracts, two sets of safety cases for one regulator to learn, two decommissioning liabilities, in a grid whose gas fields gave 15% less in the first 7 months of this year while its power plants gave 6.4% more. That is the electricity the data centres in Vučić's sentence are meant to run on.
The announcement has moved out of Tashkent's hands, and Tashkent has not confirmed it. The presidential press service's Belgrade readouts, as UzDaily and Podrobno relayed them on Tuesday, were about the documents. Gazeta.uz and Spot.uz printed Vučić's words. No Uzbek comment ran. The next signals are the site and the reactor, since the CNNC memorandum spoke of small units, and the partner in Uzatom's oversight venture.
The visit's own yield is on paper. The two presidents signed a joint declaration establishing a strategic partnership, and ministers exchanged 20 documents, by Vučić's count and Spot.uz's; Gazeta.uz lists the 20 beside the declaration. Among them: an agreement on mobility and labour migration, signed by Serbia's labour minister Milica Djurdjevic-Stamenkovski and the head of Uzbekistan's Agency for Migration Mukhsinkhodja Abdurakhmonov; an agreement on international road transport; a memorandum in support of the Middle Corridor; a protocol on railway infrastructure; a statement of intent to set up a working group for a free-trade agreement; a partnership between Samarkand region and Vojvodina; an agreement on agriculture and water; and memoranda that run from customs and renewable energy to pharmaceuticals, tourism, digital government and the environment. Mirziyoyev flew home to Tashkent from Belgrade when the programme ended.