Saudi Arabia Touts 110 Million Tonnes of Uranium Ore as Its Nuclear Deal With Washington Takes Shape
The find in Madinah is ore, not uranium metal, and Riyadh's enrichment terms remain the unresolved piece.
The URA uranium ETF closed at $42.62 on Wednesday (2026-09-23), down 2.63 per cent on the session — no visible re-rating of a supply story that has been in circulation for over a week.5 Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told the IAEA General Conference in Vienna on Monday (2026-09-14) that geological studies had identified an estimated 110 million tonnes of uranium-bearing ore in the Madinah region, a figure Saudi state television carried the same day. The announcement folded in rare earths, and markets have had days to absorb it.1,5
The headline number is ore tonnage, not contained uranium, and the distinction is where the trade sits. The centre's own estimate puts the uranium content at about 31,000 tonnes, alongside roughly 552,000 tonnes of heavy rare earths and 355,000 tonnes of light rare earths, per Business Standard.5
The numbers are best read as a resource statement, not a reserve. Attribution for the discovery runs through Saudi state media and the minister's Vienna remarks, and the resource estimate carries the standard exploration caveats.6,3
Officials spent more time on the comparison they wanted to avoid than the resource itself. Saudi Arabia's announcement prompted its own officials to defend the kingdom's nuclear ambitions against comparisons with Iran, according to CNBC-TV18, a framing that speaks to the regional politics around any Saudi enrichment capability.4
The US leg of the story is a 2025 civil nuclear cooperation agreement. War on the Rocks reported that the Saudis agreed they would not exceed 5 per cent uranium enrichment unless agreed to by the United States pursuant to a separate study, a constraint that, if verified, keeps Riyadh a recipient rather than a proliferator.7
The project sits inside two parallel tracks: the Jabal Sayid deposit in Madinah Province, identified through the Saudi Geological Survey's systematic sedimentary cover programme, and a phosphate-recovery route. Reported ore quantities at Jabal Sayid run 110-114 million tonnes.8
The phosphate route is where near-term volumes could come from. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Earth Science estimated that applying recovery to all Saudi phosphoric acid output could have yielded roughly 447-596 tonnes of natural uranium, according to Discovery Alert. That is a chemistry-plant by-product stream, not a mine.8
Saudi state media reported in November 2025 that the value of the kingdom's rare earth discoveries had reached $100 billion, up 90 per cent since 2018, with two advanced-stage exploration zones holding an estimated 644 million tonnes of resources, per Business Standard. The 110-million-tonne find extends a survey programme rather than starting one.5
An earlier mining consultancy estimate cited by i24NEWS put the deposits at over 90,000 tonnes of uranium, well above the roughly 31,000 tonnes now attributed to the Jabal Sayid resource. The gap between those two numbers is the sort of thing a term sheet eventually has to close.2,5
None of this moves crude. ICE Brent front-month traded at $100.61 a barrel and NYMEX WTI front-month at $91.23 as of Wednesday (2026-09-23), levels that reflect Gulf supply risk, not Saudi nuclear ambitions. The kingdom's oil signal and its nuclear signal are separate trades.5
For uranium, the read-through is longer-dated. If Jabal Sayid and the phosphate stream eventually supply a domestic fuel cycle, they displace some imported enrichment and fabrication demand rather than adding to global mine supply. The i24NEWS framing of the find as potentially the largest source of uranium on Earth is an ore-tonnage comparison.2,8
The next signal is the US-Saudi civil nuclear text. The 5 per cent enrichment ceiling, if it holds, defines what Riyadh can build; the resource work at Jabal Sayid defines what it could feed into it. Both need to be read against the IAEA safeguards language, not the 110-million-tonne headline. Until the enrichment terms are signed and verified, the uranium market has a resource statement and a diplomatic framework, not a supplier.7