Does Saudi Arabia Break theRusso-Chinese Duopoly in Central Asia?A Case Study of Uzbekistan, 2017–Present
By Timur Abdykasymov
Introduction
The nineteenth century brought the Great Game, the prolonged rivalry between the British and
Russian Empires that culminated in Russian colonisation of Central Asia. The twentieth century
transformed empire into the Soviet Union, and Soviet collapse into a post-Cold War order in
which Russian influence, though diminished, never fully receded. The twenty-first century
inherited both legacies: a deep structural and historical dependence on Russia, layered over an
expanding Chinese presence built on trade, credit and infrastructure. Today, however, a third
actor is beginning to complicate this arrangement: Saudi Arabia. This article asks whether Saudi
Arabia’s growing footprint breaks the Russo-Chinese duopoly that has defined Central Asian
geopolitics since 1991.
The analysis proceeds through a case study of Uzbekistan, the region’s second-largest economy
and, over the past decade, one of its fastest-growing, from 2017, when President Shavkat
Mirziyoyev launched Uzbekistan’s policy of opening the country to the world, to the present.
Part One maps the existing duopoly, distinguishing Russia’s inherited, infrastructural dominance
from China’s newer, capital-driven presence. Part Two examines Saudi Arabia’s entry into two
sectors, energy and digital infrastructure, where it has begun to offer Uzbekistan genuine
alternatives, before considering the more limited and carefully managed role that religion plays
in that strategy.
Part One: The Russo-Chinese Duopoly in Uzbekistan
Russia’s Areas of Influence
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has traditionally played the role of dominant
patron, and Central Asian states remain heavily dependent on it, both economically and
politically. During the Soviet period, all critical infrastructure, including energy infrastructure
such as pipelines and electricity grids, was built under central planning and designed to run
through Moscow-controlled transit corridors, creating dependencies that outlasted the USSR
itself. That legacy remains visible in trade flows today: in the first nine months of 2024,
Uzbekistan’s imports of Russian natural gas exceeded $1.28 billion, 3.6 times the level recorded
over the same period in 2023, as Uzbekistan turned to Russian gas imports, delivered via
Kazakhstan since October 2023, to cover a growing domestic shortfall (Gazeta.uz).
Russia also holds an effective monopoly over Uzbekistan’s emerging nuclear energy sector.
Rosatom and Uzbekistan’s Agency for Nuclear Energy Development (Uzatom) have signed a
Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian Duopoly
series of agreements to advance nuclear power in the country, including a feasibility study for a
large-scale nuclear plant featuring two VVER-1000 reactors, the establishment of irradiation
centres for agricultural and medical use, and a cooperation roadmap on women’s leadership in
the nuclear sector. These agreements reinforce what Rosatom itself describes as a strategic
partnership, one that, given the multi-decade operational lifespan of nuclear infrastructure,
implies a long horizon of continued technical and fuel dependency on Russia.
Labour migration compounds this leverage, though the picture is shifting. Remittances from
Uzbek migrants abroad accounted for roughly 14 percent of Uzbekistan’s GDP in 2024, a share
large enough to make the country’s macroeconomic stability sensitive to conditions in
destination-country labour markets, above all Russia’s (World Bank; Gazeta.uz). Historically, the
great majority of Uzbekistan’s roughly 1.3–2 million labour migrants worked in Russia. That
concentration, however, has been eroding: the number of Uzbek migrants resident in Russia fell
from around 1.2 million at the start of 2024 to roughly 698,000 by year’s end, as Tashkent has
actively worked to redirect labour migration toward Europe, the Gulf and South Korea, and as
Russia’s own migration policy has grown more restrictive (IOM Uzbekistan Migration Situation
Report). Russia’s leverage through remittances therefore remains real, but it is a diminishing
asset rather than a fixed one. Its erosion is itself part of the opening that Saudi Arabia has
stepped into.
This opening was made possible by a deliberate political choice in Tashkent. After the death of
President Islam Karimov in 2016, following 27 years of largely isolationist rule, Shavkat
Mirziyoyev inherited a country largely closed to foreign investment. From 2017 onward he
pursued what became known as Uzbekistan’s “open door” policy: liberalising the economy,
courting foreign investors, and adopting a multi-vector foreign policy explicitly designed to
reduce dependence on any single partner. This reorientation is precisely what created the space
Saudi Arabia would later occupy.
China’s Areas of Influence
Where Russia’s influence rests on Soviet legacy, inherited infrastructure and historical ties,
China’s is comparatively recent and built on capital rather than shared history. The distinction
matters analytically: Chinese presence is highly visible through large construction projects and
loans, but less institutionally rooted, lacking the cultural embeddedness Russia inherited from
empire and Union alike. China is nonetheless Uzbekistan’s largest source of direct foreign
investment.
Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian Duopoly
China’s flagship infrastructure project in the country is the China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan
(CKU) railway, part of the wider Belt and Road Initiative. Once complete, the roughly 530-
kilometre line will let Chinese goods reach European and Middle Eastern markets via a route
bypassing Kazakhstan and Russia, reducing Beijing’s dependence on the existing northern
corridor while giving Uzbekistan more direct access to Chinese markets. The intergovernmental
agreement to build the railway was signed in June 2024; a ceremonial launch followed that
December, financing worth $4.7 billion was finalised in December 2025, with China providing
roughly half as a 35-year loan and holding a 51 percent equity stake in the joint project company,
against 24.5 percent each for Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Active construction has proceeded
since mid-2025, with completion expected toward the end of the decade (Jamestown Foundation;
The Diplomat).
Chinese firms also dominate Uzbekistan’s telecommunications sector. According to the Chinese
Entrepreneurs Association in Uzbekistan, Huawei alone provides telecommunications services to
over 60 percent of the population and has built much of the country’s 2G/3G/4G/5G network
infrastructure, while the state telecom operator Uztelecom has drawn on China Development
Bank financing to upgrade its mainline services.
Despite the scale of Chinese investment, several vulnerabilities limit the depth of Beijing’s
influence. The Uzbek government caps foreign equity participation in strategic sectors, including
energy and key mineral extraction, at 50 percent, a policy designed to prevent any single external
partner from acquiring controlling stakes in critical infrastructure. The Chinese Entrepreneurs
Association’s own report further acknowledges that Chinese businesses operating in Uzbekistan
regularly encounter inconsistent policy enforcement, frequent regulatory change, and unresolved
currency risk, suggesting that Chinese presence, while vast in scale, remains institutionally
fragile. Finally, China faces a soft-power disadvantage that Russia does not share: its secular
and, in the case of its policies toward the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, at times openly
repressive stance toward Islam sits uneasily in a Muslim-majority society, and no volume of
capital can straightforwardly offset it.
Part Two: Saudi Arabia’s Entry into Uzbekistan
Why Saudi Arabia Is in Central Asia at All
Before turning to specific sectors, it is worth asking why Saudi Arabia is in Uzbekistan at all.
The answer lies in Riyadh rather than Tashkent. Saudi Vision 2030, launched in 2016 by Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is a comprehensive national transformation programme aimed at
Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian Duopoly
reducing the Kingdom’s economic dependence on oil, which has historically accounted for
roughly 40–43 percent of Saudi GDP and around 75 percent of government revenue. The
National Investment Strategy, launched in 2021, set explicit targets: attracting $1.1 trillion in
cumulative investment by 2030, raising the private sector’s share of GDP to 65 percent, and
lifting non-oil exports from 16 to 50 percent of the total. To meet these targets, Saudi state-linked
companies such as ACWA Power and DataVolt need international markets, contracts and
visibility. Uzbekistan, a fast-growing economy actively seeking alternatives to its Russian and
Chinese partners, offers exactly that.
The fit runs in both directions. Uzbekistan’s own strategic goal is to significantly expand the
renewable share of its electricity generation by 2030 as part of its broader decarbonisation
agenda (Invest.gov.uz). That target is not merely environmental; it is political. Reducing
dependence on imported fossil fuels, the large majority of which come from Russia, is a
precondition for the multi-vector independence Mirziyoyev has pursued since 2017. Saudi
capital offers a mechanism for pursuing it without relying on Chinese state financing either.
The Energy Sector
ACWA Power entered the Uzbek market in 2019 and has since become a central actor in the
country’s energy transition. The company’s flagship wind assets, the Bash and Dzhankeldy wind
farms in Bukhara region, each with a capacity of 500 megawatts, reached full commercial
operation in 2025 with a combined capacity of 1 gigawatt. A further 300-megawatt expansion,
Bash II, secured $226 million in financing from the Asian Development Bank, the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank and Standard Chartered in 2026. Altogether, ACWA Power’s
Uzbek portfolio now spans roughly a dozen projects worth a combined $7.5 billion, including
large-scale solar photovoltaic plants in Samarkand region and battery storage capacity in
Tashkent region. In 2023, the company also broke ground on Central Asia’s first green hydrogen
project, developed in two phases: an initial 3,000-tonnes-per-year facility, already operating with
support from the International Finance Corporation, and a planned second phase that would use
2.4 gigawatts of wind power to produce up to 500,000 tonnes of green ammonia annually for the
fertiliser industry.
The mechanism through which this challenges the duopoly deserves precise statement. Saudi
investment does not confront Rosatom directly; ACWA Power does not compete in the nuclear
sector. What it does instead is reduce Uzbekistan’s dependence on Russian natural gas for
electricity generation, the very dependency that makes a long-term nuclear partnership with
Rosatom feel more existentially necessary in the first place. By offering a viable, bankable
renewable pathway, ACWA Power lowers the cost of eventually exiting Russian fossil-fuel
Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian Duopoly
dependency, even without touching the nuclear relationship itself.
The Digital Sector
As established above, Chinese firms currently provide digital infrastructure to well over half of
Uzbekistan’s population, meaning that a large share of the country’s governmental, commercial
and personal data flows through networks built and maintained to Chinese technical standards.
This is a geopolitical consequence Central Asian governments understand well, even when they
rarely state it openly.
Saudi Arabia’s counter to this dependency is DataVolt, a subsidiary of the Saudi investment
holding company Vision Invest. DataVolt broke ground on its first Uzbek facility, a 12-
megawatt AI-ready data centre known as TAS-1 in Tashkent’s IT Park, in 2024, financed
through $150 million in non-recourse project financing from the German Investment and
Development Company, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the OPEC
Fund for International Development and Proparco. Beyond this first project, DataVolt has signed
memoranda of understanding with the Uzbek government for a much larger investment
programme, covering up to 500 megawatts of data-centre capacity and reportedly worth up to $5
billion by 2030. This includes a further planned facility of up to 250 megawatts in New Tashkent
and an option to jointly develop a data centre in Bukhara, though the Bukhara project remains at
the memorandum stage rather than under construction.
The significance of this investment extends beyond its financial scale. Data centres are physical
infrastructure that determines whose cybersecurity protocols, data-governance norms and
technical standards ultimately govern a country’s digital economy. A Saudi-built data centre in
Tashkent gives Uzbekistan an institution that does not run on Chinese standards, something no
other external actor has offered at comparable scale. Where ACWA Power works alongside the
existing Russian energy framework and offers an alternative pathway out of it, DataVolt
positions itself as a more direct alternative to the Huawei-dominated digital ecosystem, making it
the clearest example in this article of Saudi Arabia directly targeting a structural vulnerability in
China’s position.
The Religious Dimension
It would be tempting to explain Saudi Arabia’s growing influence in Uzbekistan mainly through
religion: Saudi Arabia as custodian of Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, projecting a form
of soft power into a Muslim-majority society that neither Russia’s Orthodox Christian culture nor
Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian Duopoly
China’s state secularism can easily match. This explanation is not wrong, but it is incomplete,
and it risks oversimplifying a more layered dynamic.
As Gregory Gause (2014) argues in the broader context of Saudi foreign policy, religious
framing is typically instrumentalised for political and strategic ends rather than functioning as a
primary driver in its own right. The same logic applies in Uzbekistan. Saudi Arabia does
maintain religious soft power in the country. Institutions affiliated with the Muslim World
League have operated there, and Saudi-funded religious education has been documented.
However, the Mirziyoyev government has deliberately managed this influence, restricting certain
forms of Salafist religious import even as it welcomes Saudi capital investment. This distinction
is analytically important: Tashkent separates Saudi economic partnership from Saudi religious
influence, treating the former as a strategic asset and the latter as a risk requiring active
management.
Religion therefore functions as a complement to Saudi Arabia’s economic presence. It supplies a
shared cultural and religious identity that neither Russian Orthodoxy nor Chinese secularism can
access, but it does not drive Saudi Arabia’s Central Asian strategy. What drives it is Vision 2030,
the search for international investment partnerships, and the geopolitical opening created by
Uzbekistan’s turn away from exclusive dependence on Moscow and Beijing. Religion makes
Saudi Arabia a more comfortable partner for Tashkent; economics makes it a necessary one.
Conclusion
Does Saudi Arabia break the Russo-Chinese duopoly in Central Asia? Not yet, and not entirely.
Russia and China retain institutional advantages, including inherited infrastructure, financing
scale, and decades of accumulated political ties, that Saudi Arabia cannot overcome in the short
term. Russia’s grip on Uzbekistan’s nuclear future through Rosatom remains uncontested, and
China's Belt and Road financing dwarfs anything Riyadh has committed to the region so far.
Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia’s influence is growing along a specific and identifiable logic. Rather
than confronting Russian and Chinese dominance head-on, ACWA Power and DataVolt have
each targeted the structural vulnerability underlying one half of the duopoly: Russian fossil-fuel
dependency in the energy sector, and Chinese-standard digital infrastructure in the
telecommunications sector. In both cases, Saudi capital does not need to displace the incumbent
outright; it only needs to make Uzbekistan’s eventual exit from that dependency more affordable
and more plausible. That is a narrower form of influence than outright displacement, but it is
real, and it makes the duopoly measurably more complex than it was in 2017.
Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian Duopoly
Uzbekistan is best read as an early and unusually well-documented case of a broader regional
dynamic. Similar dynamics are visible, in different forms, in Kazakhstan’s own energy
diversification efforts and in Kyrgyzstan’s search for investment partners beyond Moscow and
Beijing, both promising directions for further research.
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