OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman traveled to Abu Dhabi this week, where he finalized four contracts that will embed the company’s artificial-intelligence tools in the emirate’s government operations, its oil industry and its sovereign-wealth investment arm. The agreements arrive as OpenAI is said to be preparing a large private-fundraising round before pursuing a public listing. The deals signal the firm’s intent to secure strategic footholds in the Gulf’s high-value sectors.
The most sizable contract involves Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which will adopt OpenAI’s Frontier platform for constructing and supervising autonomous AI agents. The multi-year arrangement, signed through G42’s subsidiary Inception42, will integrate decision-making across oil-field development, production, refining and trading, and will operate on G42’s cloud infrastructure located in the United Arab Emirates. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In parallel, the Abu Dhabi government is collaborating with OpenAI to render portions of its regulatory framework machine-readable for AI agents, a step aimed at streamlining compliance automation. Meanwhile, the state-owned investment firm Mubadala plans to deploy OpenAI’s models to evaluate prospective transactions, leveraging the technology’s analytical capabilities to augment its deal-sourcing process.
A UAE-backed consortium that includes Mubadala-supported MGX is expected to become the lead investor in OpenAI’s current financing round, according to the Financial Times. The group would also receive an option to lease additional computing capacity in the region, giving it preferential access to the firm’s next-generation hardware as demand for AI services expands.
Altman’s presence at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC) drew attention because major U.S. oil majors such as ExxonMobil and Chevron chose not to attend this year over security concerns. When asked onstage about the biggest obstacle facing the sector, Altman replied with a single word,“Energy”,highlighting the growing tension between AI compute requirements and the availability of affordable power.
The broader AI industry is confronting mounting power constraints as companies expand data-center capacity to support ever larger models. While OpenAI promises to make future systems more efficient and cheaper to operate, the underlying energy demand could keep operational costs high and slow the pace of adoption, a concern that Altman identified as central to the technology’s sustainable growth.