Abu Dhabi’s state energy company has agreed to deploy OpenAI’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems across its oil and gas business, in a multi-year partnership signed on Monday, 2 November, alongside Emirati technology group G42. The agreement was announced at ADIPEC, the energy industry’s large annual gathering in Abu Dhabi, where OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman was in attendance.
Under the deal, ADNOC says it will become the first company in the energy sector to put OpenAI’s frontier technology to work across its operations. The systems will use OpenAI’s GPT models on computing infrastructure inside the Emirates, provided by G42.
FAKTA: The ADNOC OpenAI deal at a glance
- ADNOC, G42 and OpenAI signed a multi-year agreement at ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi on 2 November 2026.
- ADNOC says it is the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s frontier AI technology across its operations.
- The tools will use GPT models on UAE-based infrastructure supplied by G42, with human experts keeping oversight of major decisions.
- Planned uses include planning oilfield work, linking production, refining, trading and sales, and forecasting supply, demand and prices.
- No financial value for the agreement has been disclosed.
What the ADNOC OpenAI deal will cover
The partnership has two main strands. The first covers field planning: AI tools will analyse decades of information from thousands of wells, underground reservoirs and surface facilities, weighing costs and commercial factors as engineers plan new work. The aim is to shorten planning cycles and show how a decision in one area affects costs and output elsewhere.
The second strand links the rest of the value chain. Connected AI agents will track production, refining, logistics, sales and trading together, and model how market shifts could change supply, demand, prices and margins. ADNOC already runs an AI platform for subsurface work and says more than 200 AI applications are in use across the company.
A wider Abu Dhabi AI push
The ADNOC agreement was one of four deals signed between OpenAI and Abu Dhabi organisations during Altman’s visit. The others cover government services and investment analysis, where sovereign investor Mubadala and G42 unit Inception42 will apply AI to spotting opportunities and assessing risk. Inception42 also signed a separate five-year agreement to spread frontier AI tools across government, business and education in the UAE.
The deals deepen a fast-growing relationship. The UAE appointed the world’s first AI minister in 2017, G42 was founded in 2018 with Mubadala’s backing, and OpenAI is already a partner in a large AI data centre project in the Emirates. Saudi Aramco recently agreed to buy a large stake in AI firm Humain in a similar move.
What remains unclear
Neither side has published a rollout timetable, first sites, or financial terms. ADNOC chief executive Sultan Al Jaber said the partnership would explore how AI can support energy, while Altman called energy one of the hardest problems facing AI development. More coverage of the region is available on Watan News International’s English homepage.
