Beneath the desert that contains the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves lies something that Saudi Arabia spent most of its modern history ignoring: approximately $1.3 trillion in unexploited mineral wealth. Gold, copper, zinc, phosphate, bauxite, and — critically — rare earth elements. The Kingdom that built the twentieth century on hydrocarbons is now positioning mining as the third pillar of its industrial economy, after oil and petrochemicals. If the strategy succeeds, Saudi Arabia will have achieved something no other petrostate has managed: building a globally significant minerals industry from geological endowment rather than colonial inheritance.
The ambition is codified in the new Mining Investment Law, a regulatory framework that offers exploration and extraction licences to foreign companies under terms designed to compete with the world’s most mining-friendly jurisdictions. The government targets $75 billion in annual GDP contribution from mining by 2035. Ma’aden, the PIF-controlled national mining company listed on the Tadawul, is the primary vehicle — already one of the world’s largest mining enterprises by market capitalisation and expanding rapidly across phosphate fertilisers, aluminium, gold, and base metals.
The timing of the mining push is not coincidental. It arrives precisely as the giga-project portfolio contracts, as PIF redirects capital toward assets with commercial returns, and as the global economy enters a period of intensifying competition for the critical minerals that power batteries, semiconductors, renewable energy systems, and defence technologies. Saudi Arabia is not entering the mining sector because it discovered the minerals. It is entering because the minerals suddenly matter more than at any point in industrial history.
The Geological Endowment
Saudi Arabia’s mineral wealth has been known since the 1930s, when geological surveys conducted alongside the oil exploration campaigns documented significant deposits across the Arabian Shield — the exposed Precambrian basement rock that occupies the western third of the peninsula. Gold mining in the region predates Islam; the Mahd adh-Dhahab mine, whose name translates to “Cradle of Gold,” has been worked intermittently for over 3,000 years.
Modern geological mapping, accelerated under Vision 2030’s minerals programme, has confirmed deposits of: gold across multiple sites in the Arabian Shield; copper and zinc in the Jabal Sayid and Al Masane regions; phosphate in the northern Wa’ad Al-Shamaal industrial zone, where Ma’aden operates one of the world’s largest phosphate fertiliser complexes; bauxite and alumina in the Al Ba’itha region; and rare earth elements whose precise commercial scale is still being assessed but which the Saudi Geological Survey has characterised as potentially significant.
The $1.3 trillion valuation of Saudi mineral wealth — a figure cited by the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources — should be treated with appropriate caution. Mineral valuations at the exploration stage are inherently speculative, dependent on commodity prices, extraction costs, infrastructure availability, and ore grades that can vary dramatically from survey estimates to commercial production. Saudi Arabia’s mineral deposits are real. Whether they are worth $1.3 trillion at economic extraction rates is a question that decades of mining operations will answer.
Ma’aden: The National Champion
The Saudi Arabian Mining Company — Ma’aden — is the execution vehicle for the Kingdom’s minerals strategy. Listed on the Tadawul and majority-owned by PIF, Ma’aden has grown from a single gold mine in 2008 to a diversified mining conglomerate operating across phosphate, aluminium, gold, copper, and industrial minerals.
The company’s phosphate operations are its commercial centre of gravity. The Wa’ad Al-Shamaal phosphate complex in the Northern Borders Province is one of the largest integrated phosphate mining, processing, and fertiliser manufacturing facilities in the world. Ma’aden’s joint venture with Mosaic Company — the Ma’aden Wa’ad Al-Shamaal Phosphate Company — produces diammonium phosphate (DAP) fertiliser for global agricultural markets. In a world increasingly concerned about food security — a concern amplified by the Iran war’s disruption of Gulf agricultural supply chains — phosphate fertiliser is a commodity with structural demand growth.
Ma’aden’s aluminium operations, centred on the Ras Al Khair industrial complex, include a 740,000-tonne-per-year smelter powered by dedicated natural gas supply. The aluminium value chain extends from bauxite mining through alumina refining to finished rolled products. Gold production comes from multiple mines across the Arabian Shield, with Ad Duwayhi and Mansourah-Massarah among the more significant operations.
The company’s strategic pivot under Vision 2030 is toward three areas that align with global demand shifts: lithium and rare earths for battery and electronics supply chains; copper for electrical infrastructure and renewable energy systems; and industrial minerals for the domestic construction boom driven by World Cup stadium construction, Expo 2030, and the ongoing urbanisation of Riyadh.
The Rare Earth Opportunity
Rare earth elements occupy a unique position in the global economy: they are essential for electric vehicle motors, wind turbine generators, military guidance systems, and consumer electronics, yet global production is concentrated overwhelmingly in China. Beijing controls approximately 60 per cent of rare earth mining and over 85 per cent of rare earth processing. This concentration has been weaponised — China restricted rare earth exports to Japan in 2010 and has signalled willingness to use export controls as geopolitical leverage.
For Saudi Arabia, the rare earth opportunity operates on two levels. The first is geological: the Arabian Shield contains rare earth-bearing formations whose commercial potential is being assessed through the Kingdom’s expanded exploration programme. The second is strategic: any nation that can develop rare earth mining and processing capacity outside China’s control occupies a position of extraordinary geopolitical value to the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
The US-Saudi relationship — already anchored in oil, defence, and intelligence — gains an additional dimension if Saudi Arabia becomes a significant source of rare earths. Washington’s efforts to diversify critical mineral supply chains away from China align directly with Riyadh’s desire to develop a mining industry that attracts Western investment and technology. The convergence is not accidental. It is structural.
Whether Saudi Arabia’s rare earth deposits are commercially significant at scale remains unproven. But the strategic calculus does not require world-leading deposits. It requires deposits that are economically viable and politically reliable — two characteristics that Saudi Arabia can offer at a time when China’s reliability as a critical mineral supplier is questioned by every Western government.
The New Mining Investment Law
The regulatory framework for foreign participation in Saudi mining has been substantially modernised under Vision 2030. The new Mining Investment Law offers exploration licences valid for multiple years, extraction licences with terms competitive with established mining jurisdictions, and a fiscal regime designed to attract the capital-intensive, long-horizon investment that mining requires.
The law permits 100 per cent foreign ownership of mining operations — a significant departure from the joint-venture requirements that historically characterised Saudi industrial policy. Royalty rates have been set at levels that mining companies describe as competitive with Australia, Canada, and Chile. The regulatory approval process has been streamlined through the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources, which has adopted a single-window licensing system.
The government has also established Special Economic Zones with enhanced incentives for mining-related operations, including reduced corporate tax rates, customs duty exemptions, and expedited permitting. These zones are designed to attract not just extraction companies but the downstream processing facilities — smelters, refiners, component manufacturers — that capture the highest-value segments of the minerals value chain.
The practical challenge is execution speed. Mining projects typically require 7-15 years from exploration to commercial production. Saudi Arabia’s geological survey data, while improving, is less comprehensive than that of established mining jurisdictions like Australia or Canada, where over a century of systematic exploration has produced detailed geological databases. Foreign mining companies will invest in Saudi exploration if the regulatory terms are attractive, but they will produce commercial output on mining timescales, not Vision 2030 timescales.
The Food Security Nexus
The Iran war has added an unanticipated dimension to Saudi Arabia’s mining strategy. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupted 80 per cent of the GCC’s food imports, creating what humanitarian agencies described as a grocery supply emergency. Consumer prices for staples spiked 40-120 per cent within weeks.
Phosphate fertiliser production — Ma’aden’s core commercial business — sits at the intersection of mining and food security in a way that the Kingdom’s planners likely did not anticipate when the Wa’ad Al-Shamaal complex was built. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s largest exporters of phosphate fertiliser. In a global food system under stress from climate change, supply chain disruption, and population growth, the ability to produce fertiliser domestically and export it commercially is both an economic asset and a strategic capability.
PIF’s reorientation toward food security spending — accelerated by the Iran war — complements rather than competes with the mining strategy. Fertiliser production is mining. Domestic agriculture requires mineral-based inputs. The supply chain from phosphate rock to food on a table runs through Ma’aden’s operations. The connection is direct, physical, and commercially quantifiable.
The 2035 Horizon
The $75 billion annual GDP contribution target for mining by 2035 is ambitious relative to the sector’s current scale but plausible relative to Saudi Arabia’s geological endowment and capital deployment capacity. The pathway runs through several concurrent developments: expansion of Ma’aden’s existing operations; attraction of international mining companies through the new Investment Law; development of rare earth and critical mineral deposits; growth in downstream processing and manufacturing; and integration of mining output into the Kingdom’s industrial diversification — particularly construction materials for the World Cup and Expo programmes.
Mining will not replace oil. It does not need to. At $75 billion annually, it would contribute approximately 5-7 per cent of GDP — a meaningful diversification increment that reduces the economy’s sensitivity to oil price fluctuations. More importantly, mining produces physical commodities with structural demand: metals, minerals, and fertilisers that the global economy requires in growing quantities regardless of energy transition pathways.
The Kingdom that built its wealth extracting hydrocarbons from beneath the desert may yet build a second fortune extracting metals and minerals from the same geology. The irony is that the minerals were always there. What changed was not the geology. It was the global economy’s demand for what the geology contains — and a Crown Prince’s willingness to dig.
This analysis draws on data from the Saudi Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources, Ma’aden annual reports and investor presentations, the Saudi Geological Survey, PIF disclosures, the US Geological Survey, and reporting by Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Reuters, and Mining Technology. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with the Government of Saudi Arabia, Ma’aden, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.