ADNOC becomes the first energy firm on OpenAI’s Frontier platform, with G42 as partner

ADNOC, G42 and OpenAI have signed an agreement that makes ADNOC the first energy-sector company to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology, according to the Abu Dhabi Media Office. Reuters reported the deal as Sam Altman traveled to the UAE.

The signing was witnessed by Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, after he met the OpenAI chief executive. G42 signed through its subsidiary Inception42. It was one of four agreements between Abu Dhabi-based entities and OpenAI announced the same day.

What ADNOC and OpenAI agreed to

Under the energy agreement, AI will be built into ADNOC’s operations to support operational, investment and commercial decisions. The system runs on OpenAI’s GPT models using in-country inference infrastructure in the UAE, meaning the computation happens on hardware inside the country rather than abroad.

The Media Office did not publish financial terms, a deployment timeline or usage figures for the ADNOC deal. The National reports that the platform in question is OpenAI’s Frontier, which the company launched on February 5 for building, deploying and managing AI agents. The National lists HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher and Uber among early adopters.

Altman said in the announcement that “Abu Dhabi and the UAE are setting a bold, global standard for AI integration across both the public and private sectors.”

Three more deals signed the same day

The other three agreements widen the picture beyond oil and gas:

• Government: Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement leads a Machine-Readable Government initiative, which the Media Office calls the world’s first AI-native effort of its kind. Selected policies and regulations are converted into a form AI systems can read, so they can help officials with compliance checks such as permits and certificates. Each assessment is traceable to its governing rule, and officials keep responsibility for final decisions. The first pilot, with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, is already in production and covers food imports.
• Investment: Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI will apply AI to investment analysis, finding opportunities and assessing risk.
• Enterprise, government and education: Inception42 and OpenAI signed a five-year agreement to drive adoption of frontier AI in the UAE, combining OpenAI’s models with Inception42’s applied AI and consulting services for large organizations.

Local inference is the technical point

The detail that matters most for engineers is where the models run. The government pilot’s processing uses OpenAI’s UAE inference residency, with computation on GPUs in UAE data centers, and the ADNOC deal uses in-country inference as well. For an energy company and a government regulator, keeping prompts and data inside national borders is often a precondition for using a hosted model at all. Both deals are described as running on local infrastructure, though the announcement does not say who operates the data centers behind the ADNOC deployment.

The deal also extends a long relationship. According to The National, ADNOC’s AI push began in 2019 with AIQ, a joint venture with G42 in which ADNOC holds 60% and G42 40%, developing AI products for oil and gas. G42 and OpenAI first partnered in October 2023, and in May 2025 they announced Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt cluster developed by G42’s Khazna Data Centres inside a 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI campus, with Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank among the partners. The National says the first 200 megawatts were expected to go live in 2026. We covered the regional strategy in The Gulf’s bold bet on AI: Why compute is the new oil.

The money side is also intertwined. The National reports that Abu Dhabi investor MGX was among the co-leads of OpenAI’s $122 billion funding round, which closed on March 31 at an $852 billion post-money valuation. Some of the Gulf partners signing these deals are therefore also OpenAI shareholders. That does not make the agreements any less real, but it means the commercial terms, which are undisclosed, would be worth seeing.

What the announcement does not establish

The claims about efficiency and better decisions come from the signatories. No results, pilot metrics or cost figures for ADNOC have been published, and the announcement does not say which operations will go first or when staff will get access. The government pilot is the only deployment described as already live. Whether ADNOC’s use of agents moves beyond decision support is not stated.

For readers outside the UAE, the practical point is the pattern: OpenAI is pairing its enterprise agent platform with local inference and a regional partner, a model it has also discussed for data center buildouts, as in our report on OpenAI’s possible ‘AI compute campuses’ rebrand.