OpenAI Signs Four Abu Dhabi Deals, Starting With ADNOC

ABU DHABI, Nov. 2 — OpenAIOpenAI signed four agreements in Abu Dhabi on Monday with the emirate’s government, its state energy company, its wealth fund Mubadala and a unit of the AI company G42, after Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, met the crown prince, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Under one of them, ADNOC becomes what the Abu Dhabi Media Office called “the first company in the energy sector to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology.”

No values were disclosed for any of the four.

They come as OpenAI tries to finish raising money, with Abu Dhabi in the talks. Reuters’ Monday story repeated its earlier report, citing sources, that OpenAI is racing to secure commitments from investors, including Abu Dhabi-based MGX, in a fundraising that could value it at more than $1.4 trillion. The Financial Times reported on Oct. 30, citing people with knowledge of the matter, that OpenAI had cut its target to about $20 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion, from $30 billion at $1.4 trillion, according to Bloomberg News’s account of the report.

Abu Dhabi is thus both a customer of OpenAI and one of its financiers. MGX was among the co-leads of the $122 billion round OpenAI closed on March 31 at a valuation of $852 billion, counting the new money, The National noted, and investors from the Emirates were leading the new round alongside Coatue, CNBC reported on Oct. 22, citing people familiar with the deal. Inception42, a G42 subsidiary, is a party to three of Monday’s four agreements, and under one of them it will deliver OpenAI’s models to large organizations in the Emirates.

What Was Signed

The ADNOC agreement, signed by ADNOC, G42 through Inception42, and OpenAI, will “integrate advanced AI capabilities across ADNOC’s operations,” the Media Office said, running on “OpenAI’s GPT models using in-country inference infrastructure in the UAE.”FrontierThe National reported the deal as a deployment of Frontier, the platform for building, deploying and managing AI agents that OpenAI launched for businesses on Feb. 5. The Media Office’s announcement says “frontier technology,” in lower case. It was signed at ADIPEC, the oil and gas conference ADNOC hosts in Abu Dhabi, Reuters reported, and Mr. Altman said OpenAI’s most advanced models would be used to “take the hardest, most valuable problems” that ADNOC faces.Old PartnersADNOC and G42 agreed in 2019 to set up AIQ, a joint venture to develop and sell AI products for the oil and gas industry; it was 60 percent owned by ADNOC and 40 percent by G42, The National noted. G42 and OpenAI first partnered in October 2023.

With the government, OpenAI launched what the Media Office called “the world’s first AI-native Machine-Readable Government initiative.” It turns “a defined set of government policies and regulations into machine-readable form” so that AI systems can help officials with routine compliance assessments, while officials “retain oversight and accountability for final decisions.” Its first pilot, with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority on food imports, is already in production, running on “OpenAI’s UAE inference residency, with real-time model computation running on GPUs within UAE data centres.”

Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI agreed to apply AI to “investment analysis, opportunity identification and risk assessment.” And Inception42 and OpenAI signed a five-year agreement “to enable the adoption of frontier AI across government, enterprise and education.”

“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 in a statement released by the Media Office.

The deals build on an earlier UAE partnership. In May 2025 OpenAI announced Stargate UAE, the first deployment of its Stargate computing platform outside the United States, with G42, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank as partners.Stargate UAEA 1-gigawatt cluster in Abu Dhabi, of which OpenAI said 200 megawatts were expected to go live in 2026. The National says G42’s Khazna Data Centres is building it within a 5-gigawatt UAE-U.S. AI campus. The Media Office did not say whether the GPUs serving Monday’s deals sit in it.

Atoms

Mr. Altman said one of the challenges OpenAI faced was energy, Reuters reported, and went on: “We can bring down the cost of delivering great AI in almost every way, except, you know, atoms are still atoms and the physical world that has to power this, I think that is going to be the very dominant factor of the cost and the abundance and how much we can create.”

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.

He came in a tense week for the Gulf. ExxonMobil and Chevron last week cancelled plans for their executives to attend ADIPEC, citing security concerns, Reuters reported, as fears of American strikes on Iran and of Iranian retaliation gripped oil markets. The conference runs through Thursday, Nov. 5.

Mr. Altman had been in South Korea, where on Saturday he met about 50 executives from Samsung affiliates in Yongin, south of Seoul, Samsung said, according to CNBC. South Korean media reported, according to CNBC, that he also lunched with Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group; SK hynix told CNBC it was unable to confirm the meeting.

What to watch is whether Abu Dhabi’s money shows up in OpenAI’s round as well as in its contracts. OpenAI told investors on Oct. 22 that it aimed to secure signatures by the end of the following week, CNBC reported. By Monday morning in New York, OpenAI’s newsroom had announced no round.

Daily Cortex is written with AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude, and fact-checked with OpenAI’s GPT models.