Saudi Arabia's industry ministry has valued the agreements signed around the fifth Future Minerals Forum at $26.6 billion across 132 deals and memoranda. Separately, the ninth exploration licensing round awarded 172 sites carrying committed exploration spending of more than SAR671 million over two years.
Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources has put a figure on the fifth Future Minerals Forum: 132 agreements and memoranda of understanding with a combined stated value of $26.6 billion, signed in and around a three-day event in Riyadh that drew a record 21,500 attendees.
The forum ran from 13 to 15 January at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Centre under the theme “Dawn of a Global Cause”. Ministers and senior officials from more than 100 countries attended, alongside 59 international organisations and every G20 member. When the ministerial roundtable was first convened in 2022, 32 governments were represented.
The agreements span exploration and mining, financing, research and development, sustainability, value-added supply chains and downstream mining industries. It is worth being exact about what the headline number is. It is the aggregate stated value of deals and memoranda announced around a conference. It is not committed capital expenditure and it is not money that has been spent. Memoranda of understanding are cheap to sign and a large share of them expire unexercised. The useful test is what proportion converts into licences, drilling programmes and construction contracts over the next several years.
On that measure, the more informative Saudi mining data are the licensing rounds. The ministry concluded its ninth exploration licensing round this month, awarding 172 sites to 24 companies and consortia across three mineralised belts in the Riyadh, Madinah and Qassim regions. Seventy-six of those sites were allocated through a multi-round public auction. The winners committed to spend more than SAR671 million ($179 million) on exploration in the first two years alone — a much smaller number than the forum total, but one attached to a work programme and a deadline.
Exploration spending has risen sharply from a very low base. The ministry has reported annual exploration expenditure of SAR1.05 billion, roughly five times the level of four years earlier, with spending intensity climbing to about SAR144 per square kilometre from under SAR28 in 2020. Those are still modest sums by the standards of established mining jurisdictions. The trend is the point: the Kingdom is being drilled at a rate it has not seen before.
The policy scaffolding has been built out alongside it. The National Minerals Program, approved by the Council of Ministers in 2024 and since given an operating framework by the Cabinet, is written to secure raw material supply for Saudi industry, standardise governance across the agencies involved, improve supply-chain efficiency and reduce the risk attached to Saudi investment in mines abroad.
Underpinning all of it is a resource estimate. The ministry values the Kingdom's unexploited mineral resources at about SAR9.4 trillion, or $2.5 trillion, a figure revised upward in January 2024 from a Saudi Geological Survey baseline of roughly $1.3 trillion set in 2016. It is an estimate of what may lie in the ground across the Arabian Shield and the covered terrain to its east, not a measured resource, and it should be read as a statement of scale rather than of bankable value. The stated ambition is to make mining the third pillar of Saudi industry alongside oil and petrochemicals, and to roughly triple the sector's contribution to GDP by 2030.
Two projects account for a large share of what is actually being built. Ma'aden's Phosphate 3 complex at Wa'ad Al Shamal in the north, an SAR28 billion ($7.4 billion) expansion, is under construction and would lift Saudi phosphate capacity toward nine million tonnes a year. On the Gulf coast at Ras Al-Khair, an integrated steel plate complex owned by Aramco, China's Baoshan Iron and Steel and the Public Investment Fund is being built for up to 1.5 million tonnes a year. Both are processing plants rather than mines, which is consistent with a strategy that treats minerals as feedstock for domestic industry rather than as an export commodity.
A second theme in Riyadh had little to do with Saudi geology. The ministry signed memoranda with Chile, Canada and Brazil, and the programme concentrated on funding models for the infrastructure needed to open mineral corridors in Africa and Latin America, on centres of excellence to build technical capacity in supplier countries, and on a pilot scheme for supply-chain traceability. Riyadh is positioning itself as a convenor and financier of other countries' mining as well as a producer in its own right — a role that depends on capital rather than on the Arabian Shield.
The single largest commitment announced in the same week came from a company rather than a government. Ma'aden used the forum to publish a $110 billion capital programme covering eight megaprojects over the next decade, aimed at tripling its phosphate and gold businesses and doubling aluminium. That is a corporate plan rather than a contract, and it will be revised as prices move, but it is the closest thing the Kingdom has to a single figure for what building a mining industry is expected to cost.
The constraint on all of it is time. A greenfield discovery typically takes a decade or more to reach production, and the Saudi exploration effort is only a few years old. Most of what was signed in Riyadh in January will not be fairly judged until the middle of the next decade.