Nearly a year after Uzbekistan and the U.S. announced economic deals at a White House summit, the Central Asian country is touting its ability to transform diplomatic pledges into lucrative investment.
Uzbekistan’s minister of investment, industry and trade, Laziz Kudratov, told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview that his country has already executed one-fifth of last year’s commercial agreements.
“We have agreed on the pipeline of $35 billion. And out of that $35 billion, we have already implemented and completed $7 billion,” Mr. Kudratov said. “Under the leadership of [President Shavkat Mirziyoyev] and the system that he built, we are seeing the results in investment, in overall economic growth.”
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He added that trade with the U.S. exceeded $1 billion last year, the first time in the history of Uzbekistan’s bilateral relationship with Washington.
Uzbekistan’s claimed conversion rate on its U.S. investment pledges far outpaces that of larger countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia, whose single-year pledge conversions are in the low single digits.
There is no public, independent audit of Tashkent’s $7 billion figure. Kazakhstan, the region’s other major beneficiary of President Trump’s Central Asia outreach, has not published a comparable tally at all.
Mr. Kudratov traced the growth in U.S. economic ties to a set of reforms Mr. Mirziyoyev launched in 2017, when Uzbekistan unified the official and black-market exchange rates for the som and streamlined business registration and customs procedures for foreign companies.
In July, Mr. Mirziyoyev signed a law establishing the Tashkent International Financial Center, which Mr. Kudratov said provides a “predictable environment” for global investors accustomed to Western financial and governmental systems.
Uzbekistan’s National Statistics Committee recorded more than 21,000 foreign businesses operating in the country as of September, with 78% wholly foreign-owned. Mr. Kudratov said that’s a marked increase from 2017, when the country had just over 4,000 foreign businesses.
While Uzbekistan may have shown success in actualizing commercial investment, officials want to see whether that speed can carry over to critical minerals, an area of far greater strategic weight for Washington.
In February, Uzbekistan’s foreign minister, Bakhtiyor Saidov, signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. over critical minerals and registered a “heads of terms” Joint Investment Framework with the U.S. International Development Finance Corp.
Those documents are political and not tied to specific deposits or financial commitments on either side.
Similarly, advanced mining operations and processing plants will take years to build in Uzbekistan, so processed critical minerals likely wouldn’t land in U.S. stockpiles until the next decade.
The Trump administration has hammered the issue of critical minerals over the past year, sounding the alarm over China’s dominance in that area.
China has a near monopoly over the mining and processing of critical minerals, which are used in consumer products such as phones and electric vehicles, as well as military assets like advanced ballistic missiles.
Washington and Beijing have clashed over rare-earth access since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term. China tightened export controls on critical minerals in 2025 following America’s expansive tariffs on Chinese goods.
China eventually agreed to pause its export controls through Nov. 10 after last year’s meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Xi arrived in Washington this week for his first state visit to the U.S. since 2015, meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House to discuss American support for Taiwan, trade, the war in Iran and critical minerals.
Mr. Trump said the talks were positive and that the two leaders would remain in touch and possibly meet again at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in China in November and even the Group of 20 confab in Florida in December.
“I think we’ve made tremendous strides,” Mr. Trump said. “Very positive for both countries.”
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