Uzbekistan Joins a U.S. Critical Minerals Implementation Track
On February 4, 2026, in Washington, D.C., Uzbekistan’s Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau signed an intergovernmental Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on securing supply chains for critical minerals and rare earth elements, spanning both mining and processing. A further agreement signed on February 19 brought implementation and financing to the foreground. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) signed “heads of terms” (i.e., commercial principles and essential terms of a proposed future agreement) for a Joint Investment Framework and outlined a proposed joint holding company. An agreement to establish an “investment platform” was exchanged in the presence of Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. These agreements are not a single mining deal. They combine a political instrument with a financing-and-structuring track that is intended to yield a small set of projects that can be financed and built, and they treat processing capacity and supporting infrastructure not as optional add-ons but as core deliverables. They also provide a path for early projects to full review and financing while connecting them to longer-term offtake structures that match Washington’s newer supply-shock tools, including “Project Vault.” What the MoU Changes The MoU’s immediate purpose is to align government priorities for critical minerals across the value chain while setting expectations that will later shape which financing and partners are feasible. The press agency of Uzbekistan’s foreign ministry emphasized “responsible partnership” and “long-term development” as part of the public framing, placing governance and reputational risk on the same plane as the geological givens. The MoU also leaves several items deliberately unresolved in public form. These include project annexes, deposit designations, and operational timelines. That document design-choice pushes the next phase of bilateral cooperation into working-level scoping and sequencing, where only a small number of candidate projects can be advanced into full review. At the ministerial-level meeting, Washington clarified why it was framed as supply-chain security rather than commodity trade. Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that critical minerals are inputs for infrastructure, industry, and defense, while Vice President J.D. Vance stressed the expansion of production across partner networks. As previously reported by The Times of Central Asia, this framing is part of a broader repositioning of U.S. engagement in Central Asia, where diplomatic formats are increasingly paired with mechanisms intended to generate trackable transactions and private-sector follow-through. For Uzbekistan, what is attractive about this cooperation is the potential to convert resource endowment into a lever for industrial development, rather than treating extraction as the endpoint. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has publicly valued the country’s underground wealth at roughly $3 trillion. He has linked rising global demand for technological minerals to the case for higher value-added activity around strategic reserves, including lithium and tungsten. The same logic supports a commercially open posture. For Tashkent’s other investors, buyers, and processing partners, Uzbekistan’s diversification toward U.S.-linked capital signals non-exclusivity. Turning the MoU Into Projects The next phase is practical. A candidate project will advance only if investors and public lenders can transparently evaluate its licensing and...
