ADNOC signs multi-year OpenAI and G42 partnership

ADNOC signed a multi-year partnership with OpenAI and G42 to deploy OpenAI Frontier across the energy company’s operations. G42 will provide UAE-based sovereign AI infrastructure for the system, which ADNOC says will connect operational, investment and commercial decision-making.

Announced at ADIPEC on November 2, the agreement makes ADNOC the first energy-sector company to deploy Frontier, according to the company. The Abu Dhabi Media Office used the same description, but the claim has not been established by an independent market-wide assessment.

ADNOC identified two initial applications. The first will combine subsurface, facilities, economic, capital, cost and commercial inputs for full-field master planning, drawing on decades of data from thousands of wells, multiple reservoirs and hundreds of surface facilities. ADNOC expects the application to cut planning time from months to hours, but it has not disclosed a production launch date or measured results.

The second application will connect production, processing, refining, logistics, sales and trading information. ADNOC says AI agents will use those inputs to forecast supply, demand, prices and margins and assess operational and commercial effects. The partners plan to combine OpenAI’s GPT models with ADNOC’s proprietary industrial data and expertise, while human experts retain oversight of consequential decisions.

OpenAI introduced Frontier in February. The enterprise platform is designed to build, deploy and manage AI agents, giving them access to business context and tools with evaluations, identities, permissions and boundaries. The ADNOC project follows other enterprise workflow deals, including OpenAI’s expanded partnership with ServiceNow.

ADNOC says the agreement builds on a ChatGPT Enterprise rollout to more than 40,000 employees with adoption above 97%, as well as more than 200 AI applications and 70 robotics use cases deployed or in development.

The ADNOC partnership was one of four agreements announced that day between Abu Dhabi-based entities and OpenAI, spanning government, energy and investment activity. The parties did not disclose the partnership’s financial value, exact term in years or deployment milestones.