UAE Deepens Ties with Global AI Leaders as ADNOC and G42 Partner with OpenAI

The United Arab Emirates is strengthening its cooperation with major international players in artificial intelligence. On Monday, public oil company ADNOC and technology group G42 signed an agreement with OpenAI to integrate advanced AI capabilities across the energy major’s various operations.

The deal was sealed on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC), in the presence of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khalid bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

According to Sultan Al Jaber, ADNOC’s CEO and the UAE Minister of Industry, this partnership will make his group the first major global energy player to adopt OpenAI Frontier, the American company’s advanced AI platform. Specifically, ADNOC plans to integrate intelligent agents and GPT models into its operations to better connect and optimize its decision-making processes, whether operational, commercial, or investment-related. The group also intends to leverage OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue initiative to enhance the protection of its strategic infrastructure.

For Sam Altman, this collaboration represents an opportunity to harness artificial intelligence to tackle ADNOC’s most complex challenges. The OpenAI chief also highlighted a crucial dimension of this cooperation: energy could become the primary economic driver of AI development. As model costs decrease, access to abundant and affordable electricity is becoming a decisive condition for large-scale deployment.

Beyond industrial applications, this partnership also raises issues of digital sovereignty. G42 plays a central role in this regard, thanks to its sovereign AI infrastructure and the computing and inference capabilities hosted within the UAE. For ADNOC, whose operations rely on sensitive industrial data—particularly regarding its reservoirs—maintaining control over the hosting and processing of this data is a strategic imperative.

This strategy is part of a broader ambition to develop infrastructure capable of supporting the rise of AI. This is notably the goal of Stargate UAE, a project involving G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank. The dedicated US-UAE AI campus aims for an announced total capacity of 5 gigawatts, while the Stargate UAE cluster is expected to reach 1 gigawatt in the long term, with an initial phase of 200 megawatts planned.

However, deploying such infrastructure requires significant energy resources. To meet these needs, the UAE is relying on a mix of gas, nuclear, and solar power. ADNOC thus finds itself at the crossroads of two dynamics: the group is called upon to leverage the productivity gains enabled by AI, while also belonging to the energy ecosystem essential for its development.

Finally, the rapprochement between OpenAI and Abu Dhabi extends to the financial realm. MGX, the UAE-based AI-focused fund that is already an investor in OpenAI, is among the investors likely to participate in its new funding rounds. Meanwhile, agreements with Mubadala and Inception42 will enable the use of artificial intelligence to analyze investments, identify opportunities, and better assess risks.

Through this cooperation, Abu Dhabi seeks to align technology, infrastructure, energy, and capital to make artificial intelligence a new growth engine and strengthen its position in this rapidly expanding industry.