ADNOC and G42 Sign Multi-Year Deal to Deploy OpenAI Frontier

ADNOC and G42 have signed a multi-year partnership with OpenAI under which ADNOC will deploy OpenAI’s Frontier platform for connecting and coordinating frontier AI agents across its business operations. ADNOC announced the agreement on November 2, 2026, describing itself as the first energy company to deploy OpenAI Frontier.

His Highness Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, witnessed the signing at ADIPEC after meeting with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, according to the Abu Dhabi Media Office. G42 participates through its subsidiary Inception42, and the energy agreement was one of four signed between Abu Dhabi-based entities and OpenAI spanning the government, energy and investment sectors.

Where ADNOC’s existing AI, including its ENERGYai system, builds intelligence about its reservoirs, assets and operations, Frontier will connect that intelligence across the business so that operational, capital and commercial decisions can be made together rather than one after another. The deployment runs on OpenAI’s GPT models using in-country inference infrastructure in the UAE.

Two Initial Applications

The partnership will initially focus on two applications. The first transforms field master planning from a sequence of separate subsurface, facilities and economic studies into a single integrated decision. Building on ENERGYai’s reservoir-level intelligence, OpenAI’s reasoning models will integrate decades of data across thousands of wells, multiple stacked reservoirs and hundreds of surface facilities, together with capital, cost and commercial considerations, to prepare and optimize full-field development master plans in hours rather than months.

The second application will make ADNOC the first energy company to use the technology to value every barrel while it is still in the ground, the company said. It connects intelligence across ADNOC’s integrated value chain, from production and processing to refining, logistics, sales and trading, with interconnected AI agents continuously forecasting crude oil supply, demand, prices and margins and weighing the commercial and operational impact of decisions as one integrated process.

The partners will jointly develop a bespoke decision-intelligence capability combining OpenAI’s frontier models with ADNOC’s proprietary industrial data, deployed on G42’s sovereign AI infrastructure in the UAE, with human experts retaining oversight of consequential decisions. The partnership will also strengthen ADNOC’s cyber defence through OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue initiative, which helps security teams identify vulnerabilities and protect critical energy infrastructure.

“The next frontier of AI is not simply doing things faster. It is making possible what was previously beyond reach,” said Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC Managing Director and Group CEO. Altman said: “More capable AI can help us tackle some of the world’s hardest problems – particularly around energy.” Mansoor Al Mansoori, CEO of G42 International, said the partnership builds on years of collaboration with ADNOC through AIQ.

Existing AI Base and Companion Agreements

The agreement extends an existing relationship between the companies. ADNOC has rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to more than 40,000 employees, which it describes as the largest enterprise deployment of ChatGPT in the Middle East and North Africa, with adoption exceeding 97%. Its broader AI and robotics strategy spans more than 200 AI applications and 70 robotics use cases deployed or under development. ENERGYai, developed with AIQ, applies agentic AI to complex subsurface workflows and is built on a 70-billion-parameter model trained on more than 50 years of ADNOC data. ADNOC’s AiPSO tool helps production teams identify and address performance issues before they impact output, and its Real-Time Operations Center connects more than 120 rigs in a single live environment, which ADNOC says reduces engineering effort by 30-40%.

The three companion agreements announced the same day extend OpenAI’s presence across Abu Dhabi’s government and investment sectors. The Abu Dhabi Government and OpenAI launched a Machine-Readable Government initiative, led by the Department of Government Enablement, which translates a defined set of government policies and regulations into machine-readable form; its first pilot is already in production with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, focused on food imports, with real-time model computation running on GPUs within UAE data centres. Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI signed an agreement to apply advanced AI capabilities 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.