The biggest gold mine in the world (2026)

The biggest gold mine in the world is Nevada Gold Mines, a joint venture between Barrick Mining (NYSE:B) and Newmont (ASX:NEM) that spans 22 underground and open-pit operations across northern Nevada, US, including the historic Carlin Trend and Cortez districts. 

In 2025 it produced roughly 2.595 million ounces (80.7 tonnes) of gold — more than any other single operation on the planet, and enough on its own to have outproduced entire mid-tier gold nations. 

It’s held the title every year since the joint venture was formed in 2019.

What Nevada Gold Mines actually is

It helps to be clear about what’s being ranked here. Nevada Gold Mines isn’t one pit or one orebody — it’s an entire mining district, roughly the size of a small country, operated as a single combined business. Twenty-two separate mines, some of them open pits, some underground, feed a shared network of processing plants, autoclaves, and roasters spread across Nevada’s Carlin Trend, Cortez, Turquoise Ridge, and Phoenix districts. Individually, several of those mines would still rank among the world’s larger gold operations. Combined, nothing else comes close.

That combined structure is also why the comparison to individual mines elsewhere in the world — Uzbekistan’s Muruntau, Indonesia’s Grasberg, Russia’s Olimpiada — isn’t perfectly apples-to-apples. Those are genuinely single deposits. Nevada Gold Mines is closer to an entire gold-producing region under one operating banner. It’s typically reported and ranked as a single entity because Barrick and Newmont manage it that way, and because that’s how the two companies report the numbers to shareholders.

How it became the biggest gold mine on Earth

The joint venture exists because a hostile takeover fell through. In February 2019, Barrick launched an unsolicited US$17.8 billion ($25.2 billion) bid to acquire Newmont outright. Newmont’s board rejected it and pushed a counter idea instead: rather than one company swallowing the other, why not just combine the two companies’ overlapping Nevada operations into a single joint venture, split the value, and leave the rest of each business independent? Barrick agreed. The deal closed in July 2019, with Barrick taking 61.5% ownership and operational control, and Newmont holding the remaining 38.5%. Nevada Gold Mines has ranked as the world’s largest gold-mining complex every year since — a rare case of a failed corporate takeover producing a bigger, more efficient asset than the takeover itself would have.

The 1961 discovery that started it all

The story of how it was discovered in the first place is worth telling in its own right. In October 1961, a Newmont exploration geologist named John Livermore, working with colleague Alan Coope, filed mining claims in a stretch of northern Nevada desert based on a theory almost nobody else in the industry believed at the time: that gold could exist in sedimentary rock as microscopic, invisible particles, rather than the visible veins and nuggets prospectors had always searched for. Livermore had been struck by a talk from USGS geologist Ralph Roberts suggesting the region’s geology could host exactly that kind of deposit.

A three-month core-drilling program that winter proved the theory right. The cores revealed a huge, low-grade orebody — Livermore and Coope estimated roughly 11 million tonnes of ore, grading close to 0.3 troy ounces of gold per tonne, all of it invisible to the naked eye. That discovery became the Carlin Mine, and the style of deposit it revealed is now known worldwide as a ‘Carlin-type’ gold deposit. More than 40 separate deposits have since been mapped along the same 8km-wide, 8km-long stretch of desert, which became known as the Carlin Trend — one of the most productive gold-mining districts ever found anywhere on Earth, and the backbone of what’s now Nevada Gold Mines.

Bigger than most countries

The scale is genuinely hard to picture without a comparison. Nevada as a whole — driven almost entirely by Nevada Gold Mines — produces around 4.5–5 million ounces of gold a year, which accounts for roughly 64% of total US gold output. If Nevada were counted as its own country, that would place it around sixth in the world for gold production, behind only China, Russia, Australia, Canada, and Ghana, and ahead of long-established gold nations like Peru, Uzbekistan, South Africa, and Mexico. Nevada Gold Mines alone — before counting Nevada’s other, smaller operations — still produces more gold each year than most of the countries on that list.

Trouble inside the joint venture

Seven years into the partnership, the relationship between Barrick and Newmont has grown noticeably strained. In February 2026, Newmont issued a formal notice of default against Barrick, alleging that Barrick — as the JV’s operator — had been quietly diverting people, drill rigs, and capital away from Nevada Gold Mines to fast-track a separate project it owns outright nearby: Fourmile, a high-grade deposit Barrick has said could eventually produce up to 750,000 ounces of gold a year on its own. Barrick has disputed the allegation. Production at Nevada Gold Mines dipped only 3% in 2025 despite the dispute, but the disagreement is a live one, and worth watching — the joint venture structure that’s kept this the world’s biggest gold mine since 2019 isn’t guaranteed to hold in its current form indefinitely.

How far ahead is it, really?

Nevada Gold Mines’ lead over the next-biggest single gold mine is substantial. Uzbekistan’s Muruntau, the world’s second-largest gold producer, turned out roughly 1.708 million ounces in 2025 — about 34% less than Nevada Gold Mines. Russia’s Olimpiada, in third, produced 1.357 million ounces, nearly half of Nevada’s total. It’s worth noting, though, that Nevada Gold Mines doesn’t lead on every measure. Muruntau’s disclosed reserves of more than 70 million ounces represent the largest gold endowment of any mine, meaning Uzbekistan’s operation could plausibly outlast Nevada’s as a resource, despite producing less each year. 

What’s next

Barrick and Newmont’s public dispute over resource allocation is the biggest near-term question mark hanging over Nevada Gold Mines’ position at the top of this ranking. So is Fourmile itself: if Barrick brings that deposit into production as a standalone operation rather than folding it into the joint venture, it could eventually rival parts of the existing complex rather than adding to it. Either way, with 22 mines, decades of proven reserves across the Carlin and Cortez trends, and no single competing deposit anywhere close to its combined scale, Nevada Gold Mines looks set to hold the title of the world’s biggest gold mine for some time yet.

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Images: Barrick Mining