Central Asia has spent the past three years accumulating a growing stack of critical minerals agreements, memoranda of understanding and strategic partnership frameworks with Western governments. The harder question — how many of those agreements are actually translating into funded, operational mining and processing projects — has a less comfortable answer.
The backdrop is a genuine and deepening structural problem in global critical mineral supply. According to the International Energy Agency, lithium demand rose by nearly 30% in 2024, while demand for nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earth elements grew by 6 to 8%. Yet investment in the sector grew by only 5% in the same year, down sharply from 14% in 2023, with real growth after inflation at just 2%. Capital deployment is becoming more cautious precisely as demand signals intensify. And concentration is worsening: the average market share of the top three refining nations for key energy minerals rose from approximately 82% in 2020 to 86% in 2024, with around 90% of supply growth coming from a single dominant producer in each category — Indonesia for nickel, China for cobalt, graphite and rare earths. By 2035, China is projected to retain more than 60% of refined lithium and cobalt and around 80% of battery-grade graphite and rare earth supply.
Central Asia enters this landscape with significant geological endowments across minerals relevant to energy, defence, metallurgy and advanced manufacturing. The diplomatic machinery has moved quickly to connect that geology to Western strategic interests. The US launched the C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue in February 2024. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan both joined the US-led Minerals Security Partnership Forum. The EU signed an MoU with Uzbekistan in April 2024 and reinforced its Kazakhstan cooperation with a roadmap for 2025 to 2026, while launching the EBRD-administered GROW CRM programme to support project identification and feasibility studies. The US-Kazakhstan MoU signed in November 2025 has been linked to a concrete tungsten project involving Tau-Ken Samruk and Cove Capital, with reported transaction value of $1.1 billion, potential US EXIM financing and planned local refining in Kazakhstan. The EU-Central Asia Summit in April 2025 announced a €12 billion Global Gateway investment package covering transport, energy and critical raw materials.
But a regional investment package is not the same as a pipeline of bankable mineral projects. The most important filter, as one analysis puts it, is not the signing of agreements but the conversion of agreements into technically credible, economically viable and institutionally governable projects. That conversion rate is low — and the reasons are structural rather than incidental.
The first barrier is economic. Critical minerals projects are capital-intensive, price-sensitive and exposed to long development timelines. The sharp slowdown in investment growth in 2024 hit emerging-market projects particularly hard, as lower mineral prices and tightening financing conditions raised the threshold for commercial viability. The second barrier is the midstream gap. Central Asia has extraction potential, but processing and refining are where economic value is actually captured — and that is precisely where the region’s capabilities remain least developed. China is already moving to fill that gap, establishing new processing facilities in Uzbekistan for iron ore and copper. The third barrier is stakeholder misalignment. Governments want localisation, industrial upgrading and political control. Investors want returns, risk protection and exit routes. Industrial consumers want stable offtake, quality and ESG compliance. State-owned enterprises dominate mining in all five Central Asian countries, making project governance structurally complex. The fourth barrier is infrastructure: critical minerals move on railways, roads, energy grids and through customs corridors, not through diplomatic declarations, and Chinese and Russian capital already dominate the logistics networks that connect the region to markets.
China’s position in Central Asia illustrates the difficulty Western actors face. It is built not on memoranda but on investment, project financing, engineering and procurement capacity, infrastructure integration and processing control. Zijin Mining holds a 75% stake in Zarafshon, Tajikistan’s largest gold producer. Chinese companies have expanded into antimony and lithium across the region. For Western governments entering through political frameworks and MoUs, execution requires a fundamentally different type of architecture — one that defines not only the resource target but the processing route, logistics corridor, financing structure, offtake mechanism, governance model and risk allocation. Without those elements, the alliance remains diplomatic rather than industrial.
The most advanced partnerships in the region — the UK-Kazakhstan rhenium and vanadium projects, the US-Kazakhstan tungsten arrangement, and Uzbekistan’s emerging cooperation with the EU, Traxys, Orano and Metso — point toward what a credible model looks like. Whether they evolve from announcements into contractual, financed and operational structures will determine whether Central Asia’s critical minerals moment translates into lasting economic transformation or remains, for Western investors, largely a story of strategic intent.
