ADNOC signs pact with G42 and OpenAI to deploy frontier AI technology

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company has signed a partnership with G42 and OpenAI. Under the deal, ADNOC becomes the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology.

ADNOC announced the agreement on November 2, 2026. It positions one of the world’s best-known energy producers at the front of a race most oil companies are still watching from the sidelines.

What the deal covers

The partnership gives ADNOC access to OpenAI’s most advanced models, deployed through G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI group. That includes agentic AI.

Agentic AI is the term for systems that do more than answer questions. They can work through multi-step tasks with less hand-holding, closer to a junior analyst than a search box.

ADNOC plans to point this technology at its upstream operations first. Upstream is the industry’s word for finding and pulling oil and gas out of the earth, before any refining or selling happens.

The deal extends AI work ADNOC already has underway, rather than starting from a blank page.

That existing work is substantial. ADNOC previously awarded a $340 million, three-year contract to AIQ to roll out its ENERGYai platform across upstream operations.

AIQ is a subsidiary of G42 and Presight. ENERGYai was developed alongside OpenAI.

The platform is designed to draw on decades of ADNOC’s proprietary data. Two targets stand out: seismic surveying and production forecasting.

Seismic surveying is how energy companies map what lies underground before they drill. Production forecasting estimates how much a field will yield over time.

The bigger UAE play

The ADNOC agreement sits inside a much larger national strategy. The United Arab Emirates wants to use AI to boost operational efficiency at home and to become a global hub for AI infrastructure and services.

G42 sits at the center of that plan. The group and OpenAI have been collaborating since 2023, with a focus on deploying advanced AI capabilities tailored for the UAE.

The flagship project is Stargate UAE. It aims to build a computational powerhouse in Abu Dhabi capable of supporting large-scale AI capacity across multiple sectors.

The rollout is phased. The first stage is a 200 MW compute cluster planned for completion by 2026.

G42 CEO Peng Xiao has framed the ambition in sweeping terms. He has said the UAE aims to shift from being an energy exporter to an intelligence exporter, using its AI compute capacity as the engine.

What this means

For ADNOC, the immediate stakes are operational. If AI can sharpen seismic interpretation and production forecasts, the payoff shows up in better drilling decisions and fewer expensive guesses.

The company is also sitting on a resource competitors cannot easily replicate: decades of its own field data.

For G42, the pact reinforces its role as the connective tissue between global AI developers and the UAE’s state-linked economy. It is the integrator, the infrastructure builder and, through AIQ, a direct vendor to ADNOC.

Key milestones to track include progress on the first 200 MW Stargate UAE cluster, measurable results from ENERGYai across ADNOC’s upstream operations, and whether other energy majors follow ADNOC into similar arrangements with frontier AI developers.