On November 2, 2026, the Abu Dhabi Media Office announced that the Crown Prince, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohammed bin Zayed, had received Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, before attending the signing of four agreements between the American company and entities of the emirate. A first use case is already presented as being in production: assisting with food import compliance checks.
The agreements cover “the government, energy, and investment sectors.” The national oil company ADNOC, the sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, and the administration itself are signatories. In the energy component, ADNOC, G42 through its subsidiary Inception42, and OpenAI are integrating AI into the oil group’s operations to better link “operational, investment, and commercial” decisions. The deployment relies on OpenAI’s GPT models, served by an “in-country inference infrastructure,” inference referring to the execution of an already-trained model.
The administrative component, concluded without a cited intermediary, is named “Machine-Readable Government” and is led by the Department of Government Enablement (DGE). Mubadala, Inception42, and OpenAI, for their part, will apply AI to investment analysis, opportunity identification, and risk assessment. Finally, Inception42 and OpenAI sign a five-year agreement to disseminate frontier AI, meaning the most advanced models, in the administration, businesses, and education in the UAE.
A pilot presented as in production on food imports
The administrative component is the most concrete. According to the media office, the initiative translates “a defined set” of policies and regulations into a machine-readable form so that AI systems can assist public officials in routine compliance assessments, “notably” for issuing permits and certificates. Each assessment is linked to the rule that grounds it, and officials retain supervision and responsibility for the final decision.
The first pilot, conducted with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA) on food imports, is described as “already in production.” The computations rely on OpenAI’s “inference residency” in the UAE, with GPUs, these graphics processors used to run the models, located in the country’s data centers. The press release does not specify the number of files processed, the proportion of the flow concerned, or the date of a possible extension to other areas.
An agreement that is part of a series of partnerships
The press release describes the energy agreement as “historic” and makes ADNOC “the first company in the energy sector to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology.” On November 4, 2024, however, ADNOC and AIQ, an AI joint venture launched in 2020 with G42, presented ENERGYai, an agent solution that was to integrate “OpenAI models,” according to the announcement reported by World Oil. In March 2025, AIQ announced a three-year, $340 million contract to deploy this solution in ADNOC’s upstream operations, again according to the announcement reported by Oilfield Technology.
Abu Dhabi is not signing its first agreement with OpenAI. In May 2025, the company announced Stargate UAE there, presented as the first international deployment of its Stargate infrastructure project. The November 2 press release does not link the new uses to this campus. On September 24, 2025, SAP and OpenAI announced “OpenAI for Germany,” intended for German administrations and research institutes, with a launch “planned for 2026.”
The media office does not specify which data center executes these computations, nor how many import files the ADAFSA pilot has already processed.
