A Chinese company, Zhongjin Guantai Industrial Development, has proposed putting $2 billion into Uzbekistan’s mining sector, $1 billion into energy and $300 to 500 million into infrastructure and tourism, according to Dunyo, the Uzbek foreign ministry’s outlet. Separately, the state producer Navoiyuran and China’s State Nuclear Uranium Resource Development, a unit of CNNC, agreed to form a working group on joint uranium projects, including unconventional deposits.
The proposals land on a fast-rising base. Chinese direct investment in Uzbekistan has passed $8 billion this year, bilateral trade tops $6 billion, and close to 6,000 joint ventures with Chinese partners now operate in the country. Much of the recent activity clustered around the Tashkent investment forum, where a Chinese delegation under energy administration head Wang Hongzhi worked through mining, geology and critical-raw-materials files.
Tashkent’s framing matches Astana’s almost word for word. Uzbekistan’s critical-minerals plan runs $4.2 billion across 120 projects for 2026 to 2030, targets 28 minerals, and aims to build full chains for tungsten and molybdenum, from powders and alloys to rods and wire. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has invited foreign firms to deep-process strategic raw materials and create high-value chains. The same sentence could have been read aloud in Brussels.
The test is identical too. A working group and a $2 billion proposal are statements of intent. Whether Uzbekistan captures value turns on whether processing and the fuel cycle stay onshore, or whether the country ships ore and concentrate north and east with a domestic-content label attached.
Uranium is the sharp end. Kazakhstan covers about 16% of the EU’s natural uranium as Europe diversifies away from Russia, while China’s nuclear-fuel arm sets up to develop Uzbek deposits to feed its reactor build-out. One metal anchors a Western supply-security story and a Chinese one at the same time, sourced from two neighbours who are both trying to move past digging it up.
For Beijing this is routine: secure the resource, finance the project, keep the processing within reach. For Tashkent the prize is the part Astana is also chasing, the high-value end of the chain. Who owns the processing, and who controls the fuel cycle, decides which of them is right.