TASHKENT PORT HUB
Uzbekistan is one of only two double-landlocked countries on Earth. Tashkent’s answer is a $288 million multimodal terminal built with DP World: 82 hectares of rail-connected dry port, customs zones and Grade-A warehousing in the city’s southern industrial zone.
DP World Tashkent LLC — 85 percent DP World, 15 percent Tashkent Invest, the city administration’s investment arm — will build on 82 hectares inside the Yangi Avlod Special Industrial Zone in Yangihayot, southern Tashkent. Phase one, scheduled for 2026–2027 with construction starting October 2026, delivers a 150,000-TEU rail terminal and 63,000 m² of warehousing; later phases add up to 163,000 m² more. The site gets its own freight railway station, wired to the national network, trunk highways and Tashkent International Airport — a true trimodal node. Three further logistics centres worth about $900 million are planned around the country.
The terminal sits at the junction of three strategic bets. East: the China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway, under construction toward 2031. West: Uzbek freight through the Kazakh Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk — the Middle Corridor toward the Caucasus, Türkiye and Europe — grew more than 60 percent in 2025. South: a cargo terminal opened in May 2025 on the Hairatan–Mazar-i-Sharif railway in Afghanistan, with the Trans-Afghan railway to Pakistani seaports in feasibility study. The World Bank, which approved $200 million for Uzbek transport modernization in March 2026, estimates transport already accounts for nearly 8 percent of GDP and a million jobs — and that road capacity must grow roughly fivefold by 2030.
THE TIO READ
A dry port is a bet that geography can be renegotiated with infrastructure. DP World does not build $288 million terminals on speculation — it builds them where its global network needs an inland node. If the CKU railway and the Trans-Afghan line both complete, Tashkent becomes the pivot of a genuine north–south–east–west cross. Until then, the binding constraint is border efficiency, not concrete.
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