Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, known as ADNOC, announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI and G42 on November 2, 2026, at the ADIPEC energy conference in Abu Dhabi. Under the deal, ADNOC becomes the first energy company to deploy OpenAI's Frontier platform across its operations.
Frontier is OpenAI's system for running advanced AI processes across an entire organization. For ADNOC, those systems will run on OpenAI's GPT models, with computing hosted on G42's infrastructure inside the UAE. The arrangement keeps the oil company's data in the country while the models come from San Francisco.
Field master planning first
The first application is field master planning, the process of mapping how an oil or gas field is developed over its lifetime. That includes deciding where to drill, how to manage reservoirs and which facilities to build.
ADNOC plans to feed the system decades of data from its wells, reservoirs and operating facilities, with the goal of compressing full-field development planning from months down to hours.
From planning to trading floors
Later phases are expected to stretch into production, processing and trading. The plan calls for interconnected AI agents, software programs that can take actions rather than only answer questions. These agents would predict market movements and estimate how operational decisions ripple through the business.
ADNOC and OpenAI have stressed that human experts will remain in charge of key decisions.
The agreement also covers workforce training so ADNOC staff can use the tools, and cybersecurity collaboration through OpenAI's Daybreak Blue program.
Building on existing AI work
The partnership is not ADNOC's first AI effort. The company already runs ENERGYai, a subsurface platform focused on what lies beneath the ground, along with several hundred AI applications and robotics projects across its business. The OpenAI deal is meant to complement that existing work rather than replace it.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the partnership as a milestone for applying advanced AI to hard problems in the energy industry. ADNOC CEO Sultan Al Jaber framed it around exploring how AI could transform energy operations.
