SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - Last November, at a summit in Washington where President Donald Trump hosted the leaders of all five Central Asian nations, the United States signed a deal giving an American company development rights to what independent feasibility studies describe as the world's largest known undeveloped tungsten resource. The host country was Kazakhstan. The metal was tungsten.
The company is Kaz Resources, a newly formed American firm backed by up to $1.6 billion in potential federal financing. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed a memorandum of understanding with Kazakhstan's Ministry of Industry and Construction at the summit. Trump had negotiated the final terms with Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev directly, by telephone, weeks before.
"It's the only project that President Trump and Secretary Howard Lutnick have been involved with directly in the negotiations and discussions with President Tokayev," Pini Althaus, executive chairman of Kaz Resources, told Fastmarkets in March 2026.
The deal is a measure of how urgently Washington views its position in tungsten, a metal it has not produced commercially since 2015 and which China spent the past year systematically cutting off from Western supply chains.
The ground at the center of that effort lies in Kazakhstan's Karaganda region, in the heart of a country that spent seven decades as a Soviet republic and emerged with some of the world's largest untapped mineral reserves. Outside the village of Unrek, population 407, a string of water-filled craters sits across the steppe. Soviet engineers dug them during the Cold War, searching for tungsten in a landscape that offered little but distance. They confirmed what they were looking for. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, the workers left, and the craters filled with rain. Those holes are now at the center of a 21st-century supply chain war.
The two deposits are Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty, less than 32 kilometers apart in the Karaganda mining district, roughly 160 kilometers south of the city of Karaganda. Feasibility studies completed in April 2023 reported JORC-compliant mineral resources of 1.4 million tons of tungsten trioxide across both sites.
Cove Kaz Capital Group, the operating entity behind Kaz Resources, holds a 70 percent interest in the joint venture, with Kazakhstan's state mining company Tau-Ken Samruk retaining 30 percent. Cove Kaz describes the combined asset as the world's largest known undeveloped tungsten deposit. Planned annual output at full development is 12,000 metric tons, approximately 15 percent of current global production. Kazakhstan holds an estimated two million tons of tungsten resources in total, placing it second in the world after China according to analysis by China's Geological Survey.
For most of the post-Soviet period, those resources sat largely untouched. What changed was not Kazakhstan. It was China.
In February 2025, Beijing imposed export licensing controls on tungsten products, including ammonium paratungstate (APT), the refined intermediate from which tungsten metal and carbide are manufactured.
By late 2025, shipments had effectively stopped. Data from China's General Administration of Customs showed the combined annual export volume of APT powder, and tungsten carbide powder fell approximately 41.7 percent year on year in 2025, to roughly 3,877 tons. In January and February 2026, APT exports dropped to zero. In those same two months, China recorded a net import of 1,363 metric tons of tungsten metal content, compared with a net export of 545 metric tons a year earlier. The country responsible for nearly four-fifths of global tungsten supply had become a net importer of it.
Prices moved accordingly. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey showed the Rotterdam benchmark for APT rising from $331 to $675 per metric ton unit over the course of 2025. By January 2026, Fastmarkets assessed the same benchmark at $1,090 to $1,150 per metric ton unit, more than three times the level at the start of the previous year. In a February 2026 research note, analysts at BMO Global Commodities Research warned the world had "sleepwalked" into a tungsten crisis, driven by declining ore grades in Chinese mines, tightening environmental restrictions, and years of underinvestment elsewhere.
The severity of that crisis traces back to what tungsten actually is.
It has the highest melting point of any element on earth, 3,422 degrees Celsius, and a density approaching that of gold. In carbide form it is virtually irreplaceable in cutting tools and drill bits. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) classifies it as a critical mineral; the defense establishment calls it a war metal: it goes into armor-piercing projectiles, missile warheads, and fighter jet components, and is essential in semiconductor interconnects. USGS data placed China's 2025 output at 67,000 metric tons against a world total of 85,000.
Washington was not the only power that understood what a disruption to that supply would mean.
China had already moved into Kazakhstan before the American deal was announced. The Boguty mine in Almaty Oblast, near the Chinese border, entered commercial production in April 2025 under Jiaxin International Resources Investment, a Hong Kong-listed Chinese company. Targeted output for 2026 is approximately 7,085 metric tons of contained tungsten oxide. In the south of Kazakhstan, a Chinese company mines tungsten. In the center, an American company is preparing to do the same.
Kazakhstan has played both sides through what Tokayev calls a "multivector" foreign policy, the deliberate balancing of competing interests from Moscow, Beijing, and Washington. The country participates in a Russian-led military alliance and a Chinese-led trade bloc, yet signed 29 agreements with American companies at the Washington summit worth over $17 billion. The U.S. accounts for only five percent of Kazakhstan's critical minerals exports, according to The Diplomat, while China takes 27 percent and Russia 16 percent. At the summit in November 2025, Tokayev declared that Trump had been "sent by heaven."
"Our economic security depends on our ability to diversify our access to critical minerals," Sergio Gor, the U.S. special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs, said at a C5+1 critical minerals dialogue in Astana in June 2026, according to the Times of Central Asia.
The consequences extend beyond Central Asia. No single fact makes that clearer than what happened in South Korea's Gangwon Province on March 16, 2026. That was the day the Sangdong mine returned to production after 32 years.
Sangdong once generated 70 percent of South Korea's total export earnings during the country's post-war reconstruction in the 1960s. It closed in 1994, undercut by cheap Chinese supply. Almonty Industries, a Canadian mining company that acquired the site in 2015, invested more than $100 million rebuilding it as a modern underground operation.
Almonty projects that at full capacity, following a second expansion targeted for 2027, Sangdong will supply approximately 40 percent of global tungsten demand outside China. The mine's ore grade, at approximately 0.51 percent tungsten trioxide, is roughly three times the global average, with an expected mine life of at least 45 years.
"This is a significant milestone in the effort by the U.S. and its allies to diversify supply chains for critical minerals away from China," Lewis Black, chairman, president and chief executive of Almonty, said at the mine's commissioning ceremony in March 2026, "which currently produces approximately 88 percent of the world's tungsten supply."
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