#UAE #AgenticAI - Abu Dhabi has signed four agreements with OpenAI, covering government, energy and investment. Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and witnessed the signings during a high level meeting on integrating AI across government services and key economic sectors. Under one deal, Abu Dhabi’s national oil company ADNOC will become the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology. Meanwhile, the government launched a machine-readable rulebook pilot with OpenAI. Sovereign investor Mubadala and Abu Dhabi AI group G42’s subsidiary Inception42 also signed new agreements. No financial terms were disclosed.
SO WHAT? - The deals put OpenAI’s models into real work at ADNOC, Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi government, expanding the US AI company’s footprint in the UAE”s enterprise AI sector. The new deals were enabled by OpenAI’s UAE inference residency, which went live in August 2026, making the country the first market in the Middle East and North Africa where ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu customers can keep model execution within the country.
KEY POINTS:
Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. He then witnessed four agreements between Abu Dhabi entities and OpenAI, covering government, energy and investment.
ADNOC, G42 company Inception42) and OpenAI signed an agreement making ADNOC the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology. It will be used across ADNOC’s operations to support operational, investment and commercial decisions.
ADNOC will run OpenAI’s GPT models on in-country inference infrastructure in the UAE. The company says the deal supports its ambition to become the world’s most technology- and AI-enabled energy company.
Abu Dhabi Government and OpenAI launched the Machine-Readable Government (MRG) initiative, billed as the world’s first AI-native programme of its kind. It turns a defined set of government policies and regulations into a form AI systems can read.
MRG helps officials with routine compliance checks, including permits and certificates. Each assessment traces back to the governing rule, and officials keep oversight and accountability for final decisions.
The Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi (DGE) leads and governs MRG. Its first pilot is already in production with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA), covering food imports.
Machine-Readable Government processing uses OpenAI’s UAE inference residency, with real-time model computation on GPUs inside UAE data centres. The initiative supports Abu Dhabi’s goal of becoming the world’s first fully AI-native government in 2027.
Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala signed an agreement with Inception42 and OpenAI to apply advanced AI to investment analysis, opportunity identification and risk assessment. The aim is to enable better-informed investment decisions and long-term value creation.
Inception42 and OpenAI alo signed a five-year agreement to help adopt frontier AI across UAE government, enterprise and education. They will build enterprise solutions for large UAE organisations, pairing OpenAI’s models with Inception42’s applied AI and consultancy services.
ZOOM OUT - OpenAI’s Abu Dhabi deals build on a UAE presence that began expanding in May 2025. Abu Dhabi AI company G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank and Cisco announced Stargate UAE during President Trump’s official visit to the Emirates. The one gigawatt cluster wil lbe the first Stargate site outside the United States, its first 200 megawatts of capacity expected to be announced imminently. OpenAI added UAE data residency for ChatGPT Enterprise, Edu and its API in November 2025. It then added inference residency in August 2026, so that AI processing also stays on GPUs hosted in the UAE.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: Abu Dhabi Media Office
Read more about OpenAI in the Middle East:
Emirates NBD now on OpenAI’s in-country inference (Middle East AI News)
EMB Global named as OpenAI Select Partner (Middle East AI News)
OpenAI now offers inference residency to UAE enterprises (Middle East AI News)
OpenAI offers UAE data residency for enterprise customers (Middle East AI News)
Emirates partners with OpenAI for enterprise AI (Middle East AI News)