Uzbekistan will begin construction of a new Tashkent International Airport this month, the government announced in May. The existing Islam Karimov International Airport, the country's primary aviation hub, handles approximately 14 million passengers annually and has been operating at or near capacity as Uzbekistan's tourism and business travel volumes have surged.
The new airport is designed for 30 million passengers per year — more than double the current facility's throughput. The project is part of Uzbekistan's broader infrastructure push that has accompanied its sustained GDP growth above 6% annually since 2021. Aviation connectivity has been identified as a strategic constraint: Tashkent is a natural hub for Central Asia and is increasingly used as a transit point between Europe and South/East Asia, but the airport infrastructure has not kept pace with demand.
Tashkent handled 14 million passengers in 2025. The new airport targets 30 million. The gap between those numbers is Uzbekistan's growth story in a single metric.
The airport project joins a series of large infrastructure commitments Uzbekistan is making simultaneously: the new Tashkent metro lines, the Tashkent–Andijan high-speed rail extension, and the Surhan hydropower plant. Financing is expected to come from a mix of sovereign bonds, multilateral lending (EBRD, ADB, IsDB), and bilateral agreements — the same mix that has funded Uzbekistan's infrastructure buildout since 2019.
For the Middle Corridor, an expanded Tashkent hub matters: the airport serves as an entry point for cargo and passengers moving between Central Asia and Western markets. Uzbek aviation has been growing fast — new direct routes to European capitals have been added since 2023, and Uzbekistan Airways has expanded its widebody fleet. The new airport is the infrastructure platform that makes the next phase of that expansion possible.