Adnoc has signed an agreement with OpenAI and G42 to become the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s Frontier technology, as it seeks to expand AI use across its operations.
Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who is in Abu Dhabi to attend Adipec, on Monday, and witnessed the agreement, signed by G42 through its subsidiary Inception42.
“Abu Dhabi and the UAE are setting a bold, global standard for AI integration across both the public and private sectors to make sure the benefits of AI reach everyone,” Mr Altman said.
“We are proud to support the UAE’s ambition, anchored in a shared commitment to safety, accessibility and responsible innovation.”
The project will integrate advanced AI capabilities across Adnoc’s operations, enabling more connected operational, investment and commercial decision-making to improve efficiency and productivity.
The technology will run on OpenAI’s GPT models using inference infrastructure based in the UAE.
OpenAI launched Frontier on February 5 as an enterprise platform for building, deploying and managing AI agents. HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher and Uber were among its first adopters.
It was one of four agreements signed between Abu Dhabi-based entities and OpenAI, spanning the government, energy and investment sectors.
The Abu Dhabi government and OpenAI also launched what they described as the world’s first AI-native Machine-Readable Government initiative, part of the emirate’s goal to become the world’s first fully AI-native government.
The initiative converts a set of government policies and regulations into a format AI systems can read, so they can help officials with routine compliance assessments, such as issuing permits and certificates. Officials keep oversight of and accountability for final decisions.
Led by the Department of Government Enablement, its first pilot is already running with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority and focuses on food imports.
Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI signed an agreement to apply AI to investment analysis, opportunity identification and risk assessment.
Inception42 and OpenAI also signed a five-year agreement to support the adoption of frontier AI across government, enterprise and education in the UAE.
Adnoc has been building its AI capabilities for several years. In 2019, it agreed with G42 to set up a joint venture to develop and commercialise AI products for the oil and gas industry. The venture, AIQ, was 60 per cent owned by Adnoc and 40 per cent by G42.
The agreements build on OpenAI’s long-standing ties with the UAE. G42 and OpenAI first partnered in October 2023 to apply the US company’s generative AI models in sectors including financial services, energy, healthcare and public services.
In May last year, the two companies announced Stargate UAE, OpenAI’s first international deployment of its Stargate AI infrastructure and the start of its OpenAI for Countries programme. The 1-gigawatt cluster is being developed by G42’s Khazna Data Centres within the 5-gigawatts UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi, with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank as partners. OpenAI said at launch that the first 200 megawatts were expected to go live in 2026.
The Abu Dhabi capital has also gone into OpenAI with MGX among the co-leads of OpenAI’s $122 billion funding round, which closed on March 31 at an $852 billion post-money valuation.
