Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) on 2 November 2026 announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI and G42 at ADIPEC. The announcement is set out in an ADNOC press release published on Zawya and appears on the same date in G42’s news listing under the same headline.
ADNOC said it is “the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) platform” for connecting and coordinating frontier AI agents across complex business operations. Where ADNOC’s existing AI, including ENERGYai, builds deep intelligence about its reservoirs, assets and operations, the statement says OpenAI Frontier will connect that intelligence across the business “so operational, capital and commercial decisions can be made together rather than one after another.”
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, according to the release.
His Excellency Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC Managing Director and Group CEO, said: “The next frontier of AI is not simply doing things faster. It is making possible what was previously beyond reach. Through this landmark partnership with OpenAI and G42, ADNOC is taking a major step towards connecting intelligence across our entire business, combining world-leading AI with decades of industrial expertise to make better decisions, unlock greater value and strengthen energy security.”
He added: “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. This is industrial AI at scale, pioneered here in Abu Dhabi, and it will help define the future of energy.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said: “More capable AI can help us tackle some of the world’s hardest problems – particularly around energy. By combining frontier AI, sovereign infrastructure and industry expertise, this first-of-its-kind partnership will help ADNOC move faster, operate more efficiently and make better decisions across the energy value chain.”
His Excellency Mansoor Al Mansoori, CEO of G42 International, said: “You should not have to use AI to benefit from it. Some of the greatest value will come from improving the systems humanity depend on, and energy is fundamental to every economy. The UAE is building an AI native nation with a global purpose to export intelligence responsibly as we have long exported energy.” He pointed to years of collaboration with ADNOC through AIQ.
The partnership will initially focus on two applications, the statement says. The first would turn 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 to combine decades of data across thousands of wells, multiple stacked reservoirs and hundreds of surface facilities with capital, cost and commercial considerations. The second, ADNOC said, would make it the first energy company in the world to use this technology to value every barrel while it is still in the ground, connecting intelligence from production and processing to refining, logistics, sales and trading.
The partners will develop and deploy the capability using OpenAI Frontier, combining OpenAI’s models with ADNOC’s proprietary industrial data and expertise, deployed on G42’s sovereign AI infrastructure in the UAE, with human experts retaining oversight of consequential decisions, the release says. It also says the partnership will strengthen ADNOC’s cyber defence through OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue initiative.
ADNOC and OpenAI will co-develop advanced solutions and equip ADNOC’s workforce to use them, building 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 is part of a strategy that already encompasses more than 200 AI applications and 70 robotics use cases deployed or under development, according to the same statement.