Abu Dhabi signs four deals with OpenAI during Sam Altman’s visit, led by oil giant ADNOC

Abu Dhabi’s state oil company ADNOC will run OpenAI’s GPT models across its operations, one of four agreements between OpenAI and Abu Dhabi organisations signed on Monday as Sam Altman met the emirate’s crown prince, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed.

The deals, announced by the Abu Dhabi Media Office, cover energy, government and investment. They also tie OpenAI more closely to G42, the Abu Dhabi AI group already building Stargate UAE with it, whose subsidiary Inception42 is a party to three of the four. None of the parties gave a value for any of them.

What ADNOC is getting

ADNOC, G42 (through Inception42) and OpenAI signed what the media office calls a landmark agreement that makes ADNOC “the first company in the energy sector to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology”. That is the government’s claim, and the release doesn’t name the product. The National, Abu Dhabi’s state-owned English daily, reports that it is Frontier, the platform OpenAI launched in February for companies to build and run AI agents.

According to the release, the AI will be built into ADNOC’s operations to make its operational, investment and commercial decisions “more connected”. It will run on OpenAI’s GPT models using inference infrastructure inside the UAE, so the computing happens in the country rather than in US data centres. The release gives no timeline, headcount or list of sites.

Altman was in Abu Dhabi for ADIPEC, the energy industry’s big annual exhibition, The National reported. In the government release, he said:

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. We are proud to support the UAE’s ambition, anchored in a shared commitment to safety, accessibility and responsible innovation.

Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI

Government rules that AI can read

The second deal is with the Abu Dhabi government itself. It and OpenAI have launched what they call the world’s first AI-native “Machine-Readable Government” initiative, part of Abu Dhabi’s stated goal of becoming the first fully AI-native government.

The idea is to turn a set of government policies and regulations into a form that AI systems can read, so they can help officials with routine compliance checks, such as issuing permits and certificates. Each assessment is traceable to the rule behind it, and officials keep oversight of and responsibility for the final decision, the release says.

A first pilot, run by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement, is already live with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, checking food imports. It runs on GPUs in UAE data centres through OpenAI’s UAE inference residency, an option that keeps processing for eligible business customers inside the country.

Mubadala and a five-year deal

The other two agreements go through Inception42:

• Mubadala: Abu Dhabi’s sovereign investor, Inception42 and OpenAI will apply AI to investment analysis, finding opportunities and assessing risk.
• Five-year partnership: Inception42 and OpenAI will jointly sell AI to large UAE organisations, pairing OpenAI’s models and engineers with Inception42’s consultancy and professional services, across government, business and education.

That second deal makes Inception42 a local partner for OpenAI’s business sales in the UAE.

Where the money comes from

The ties already run both ways. G42 and OpenAI first partnered in October 2023, and in May 2025 they announced Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt computing cluster in Abu Dhabi and the first project under OpenAI’s “OpenAI for Countries” programme. OpenAI said then that the first 200 megawatts were expected to come online in 2026.

Abu Dhabi money also flows the other way. Its AI investment fund MGX co-led OpenAI’s funding round that closed in March, and UAE investors were lining up to lead the company’s next round, which was pitched at up to $30 billion and has since reportedly shrunk to about $20 billion. Monday’s deals add a third strand: Abu Dhabi’s biggest state companies as customers.

Running a US company’s models on servers at home, rather than building its own from scratch, is also how most countries chasing “sovereign AI” are going about it.

Why it matters

OpenAI is now an investee, an infrastructure partner and a supplier to the same state. The deals put its models inside a national oil company and a government’s permit checks, but with no figures disclosed, how much they are worth to OpenAI is unknown.

Sources: Abu Dhabi Media Office; OpenAI (Stargate UAE); The National.