TASHKENT AIRPORT HUB
Islam Karimov Tashkent International closed 2025 with 9,986,445 passengers — up 14.5 percent, 86 percent of them on international routes — inside an airport designed for 11 million and walled in by the city. The answer is a $2.5 billion greenfield replacement that broke ground in October 2025.
The existing airport has tripled its traffic in eight years — from roughly 3 million to 9.99 million passengers — on 79,958 flights in 2025. It cannot grow further: surrounded by urban fabric, it is capped at 11 million passengers and is projected to hit that ceiling by 2029, after which it closes entirely. Meanwhile Uzbekistan’s airports network-wide set a record of 15.5 million passengers in 2025 (+14.8%), served by 71 airlines flying to 106 destinations; Air China, China Eastern, T’Way and AirAsia X all entered the market in 2025. A stopgap expansion is under way — the international terminal grew from 45,000 to 65,000 m² and the arrival hall added 2,100 m² in June 2025 — but the structural fix lies 25 km southeast.
New Tashkent International Airport, legally established by presidential decree on 25 November 2025, is being built in the Urtachirchik and Kuyichirchik districts on a 1,310-hectare site by a consortium of Saudi Arabia’s Vision Invest, Japan’s Sojitz and Incheon International Airport Corporation under a 35-year PPP. Phase one — two 4-kilometre runways, a 208,000 m² terminal, 98 stands, 14 jet bridges, 30 movements per hour — handles 20 million passengers and 129,000 tonnes of cargo from late 2030; the master plan scales to 46 million passengers with 40+ bridges and 160 stands. Rail and trunk-highway links are wired into the design from day one. On 2 October 2025 the airport’s ICAO code changed from Soviet-era UTTT to UZTT — a symbolic marker of the handover era.
THE TIO READ
Tashkent is doing what Almaty did in miniature and Astana never managed: replacing rather than patching its gateway. The consortium — Gulf capital, Japanese trading-house discipline, and the operator of one of the world’s best airports — is the strongest aviation team assembled in Central Asia. The risk is the four-year gap: TAS hits its ceiling around 2029, the new field opens in late 2030. Watch the interim expansion programme; that bridge year is where congestion will bite.
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