OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in Abu Dhabi, where he secured contracts to deploy AI products across government, the oil sector, and sovereign wealth management. The deals come as the ChatGPT maker is reportedly looking to lock down a mega funding round ahead of an IPO.
The biggest of the four agreements is with ADNOC, which will deploy OpenAI’s Frontier platform for building and managing AI agents. The multi-year deal, signed with G42 subsidiary Inception42, will link decisions across oilfield development, production, refining, and trading, and will run on G42 infrastructure in the UAE. No financial terms were disclosed. The Abu Dhabi government is also working with OpenAI to make some of its policies readable by AI agents. Separately, Mubadala will apply OpenAI’s models to analyze potential deals.
A consortium of UAE backers, including Mubadala-backed MGX, is expected to be the largest investor in OpenAI’s latest funding round — launched after the company delayed its IPO — and will get an option to lease new computing capacity in the region, the Financial Times reported.
Altman’s appearance at ADIPEC is notable not only because Exxon and Chevron executives skipped this year over security concerns. His visit also comes as the AI industry faces power constraints amid the massive data center build-out.
