ADNOC Signs Multi-Year Deal With OpenAI and G42 to Deploy Frontier AI

Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI and G42 at ADIPEC on November 2, 2026, saying the agreement makes it the first energy company to deploy OpenAI Frontier, a platform for connecting and coordinating frontier AI agents across complex business operations.

Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, witnessed the signing of the agreement. The partners will jointly develop and deploy a bespoke decision intelligence capability combining OpenAI’s latest-generation frontier models with ADNOC’s proprietary industrial data and expertise, deployed on OpenAI’s GPT models and G42’s sovereign AI infrastructure in the UAE. Human experts will retain oversight of consequential decisions, and all solutions will operate within ADNOC’s oversight, which the company said ensures proprietary data and critical infrastructure remain protected.

ADNOC said Frontier will extend its existing AI systems, which include ENERGYai, its specialist subsurface platform. Where those tools build intelligence about reservoirs, assets and operations, the new capability is designed to connect that intelligence across the business so operational, capital and commercial decisions can be made together rather than sequentially.

Two Initial Applications

According to the announcement, the partnership will initially focus on two applications. The first will transform 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 advanced 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. ADNOC said full-field development master plans can then be prepared and optimized in hours rather than months, with the whole field optimized at once instead of each reservoir or facility separately.

The second application will value every barrel while it is still in the ground, which ADNOC said is a first for an energy company. ADNOC said interconnected AI agents will continuously forecast crude oil supply, demand, prices and margins, predict impacts before they occur, and weigh the commercial and operational impact of each decision as one integrated process across production, processing, refining, logistics, sales and trading, areas where it said decisions currently often rely on different systems, data and priorities.

Cybersecurity, Workforce and Existing AI Portfolio

ADNOC said the partnership will also strengthen its cyber defence through Daybreak Blue, an OpenAI initiative that helps security teams identify vulnerabilities and protect critical energy infrastructure, and that the partners will co-develop AI solutions while training ADNOC’s workforce to deploy and use them. That work builds on ADNOC’s rollout of ChatGPT Enterprise to more than 40,000 employees, which the company describes as the largest enterprise deployment of ChatGPT in the Middle East and North Africa, with adoption exceeding 97%.

The agreement sits within an AI and robotics strategy that ADNOC said already spans more than 200 AI applications and 70 robotics use cases deployed or under development across drilling, production, infrastructure, logistics and shipping. The company cited ENERGYai, developed with AIQ, which 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; AiPSO, which helps production teams identify and address performance issues before they affect output; and an AI-enabled Real-Time Operations Center connecting more than 120 rigs in a single live environment, which it said has reduced engineering effort by 30–40%.

Executive Statements

Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC’s Managing Director and Group CEO, said: “As the first energy company to deploy OpenAI Frontier, we are demonstrating how frontier AI can move beyond individual applications to reshape the performance of an entire industry.” He described the deployment as industrial AI at scale, pioneered in Abu Dhabi.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the agreement as a first-of-its-kind partnership combining frontier AI, sovereign infrastructure and industry expertise, saying it will help ADNOC move faster, operate more efficiently and make better decisions across the energy value chain.

Mansoor Al Mansoori, CEO of G42 International, said the partnership builds on years of collaboration with ADNOC through AIQ and advances the UAE’s ambition to become an AI-native nation that exports intelligence. “What we build here should strengthen the energy system the world relies on, with benefits that reach people far beyond our borders,” he said.