Artificial intelligence shared the spotlight with oil and gas at the opening of the world’s largest energy conference in Abu Dhabi, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined senior UAE officials to unveil a major partnership designed to bring advanced AI technology into the energy sector.
The opening ceremony of ADIPEC 2026, attended by News Media, brought together government officials and energy executives as the war involving Iran and disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz continue to place exceptional strain on global energy supplies.
Yet while delegates discussed oil output, maritime routes and energy security, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology and chief executive of state-owned energy company ADNOC, posed a broader challenge to the technology industry.
From left, Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer; Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO; Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi; and Ahmed Al Kuttab, chairman of the Department of Government Enablement–Abu Dhabi, announce the Machine-Readable Government initiative in Abu Dhabi (Abu Dhabi Media Office)
“From the moment ChatGPT was born, the world has asked what energy can do for AI. And now, together, we will find out what AI can do for energy,” Al Jaber told the audience as he introduced the partnership between ADNOC, OpenAI and Abu Dhabi-based technology company G42.
The agreement represents a major step in the UAE’s effort to establish itself as a global artificial intelligence hub. The country is drawing on its energy resources, financial power and expanding relationships with U.S. technology companies to influence the future direction of the industry.
Still, the larger question is not simply what the partnership promises, but what AI can realistically deliver for the energy business.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the opening ceremony of ADIPEC 2026 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on Nov. 2, 2026. ADNOC, OpenAI and G42 announced a major partnership focused on applying artificial intelligence to the energy industry. (Efrat Lachter/News Media)
Speaking exclusively with News Media on the sidelines of ADIPEC, Dr. Angela Wilkinson, secretary general and CEO of the World Energy Council, said the most promising part of the presentations by Altman and Al Jaber was their emphasis on people.
“That it isn’t about AI taking decisions for humanity, it’s about AI enabling people to make better decisions,” Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson said the expanding relationship between artificial intelligence and energy should not be viewed only as a push to automate industrial operations. Instead, she said, it could broaden what people are capable of doing.
“I think what really cheered me up most is the recognition that it’s a people-centric conversation on both sides of the equation,” she said.
Dr. Angela Wilkinson, secretary general and CEO of the World Energy Council, speaks with News Media at ADIPEC 2026 in Abu Dhabi about global energy markets, artificial intelligence and the need to build greater resilience amid regional instability. (Efrat Lachter/News Media)
Amos Hochstein, a managing partner at TWG Global and former senior adviser to President Joe Biden, said the OpenAI-UAE partnership could bring important benefits, but warned that the fast expansion of AI must be weighed against its financial and social costs.
Speaking with News Media at ADIPEC, Hochstein said, “The energy sector is going to be one of the big beneficiaries of AI coming into the sector.” He also cautioned that the United States must maintain its leadership in advanced AI without leaving Americans to bear the cost of its expansion. Hochstein urged the Trump administration to work more closely with industry and other parts of society to increase the benefits while limiting the risks.
The ADNOC deal is intended to link advanced AI systems across the company’s operations, including oilfield development, reservoir management, refining, logistics and commercial trading.
ADNOC said one early application will combine decades of data from thousands of oil wells, numerous reservoirs and hundreds of facilities. The goal is to produce complex development plans in hours instead of months.
The company says the technology could increase efficiency, reduce costs and enable energy producers to react faster to shifting market conditions. Those anticipated gains, however, have not yet been independently verified.
For the UAE, the project is about more than one corporate agreement.
Unmanned, AI-operated vessels are displayed at the 2026 ADIPEC conference on Nov. 2, 2026. (Efrat Lachter/ News Media)
The country is also a partner in the planned Stargate UAE project, a major computing infrastructure initiative involving U.S. technology companies. The effort forms part of Abu Dhabi’s wider campaign to become an international center for artificial intelligence.
In a separate interview with News Media in Dubai, Mohammed Baharoon, director general of research center B’huth, described the UAE’s ambitions as a shift from exporting oil barrels to exporting digital computing capacity.
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Baharoon said artificial intelligence could trigger an economic transformation on the scale of earlier industrial revolutions, generating new industries and jobs while disrupting established professions.
He warned, however, that regulators are finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of technological change.
“We will need to bring in the concepts of regulation at the point of development, not after the development has happened,” Baharoon told News Media.
In his view, governments and technology companies must address potential risks during the development process instead of waiting until AI systems are already widely deployed.
Attendees gather at ADIPEC 2026, one of the world’s largest energy conferences, held in Abu Dhabi from Nov. 2–5, 2026. Industry leaders discussed global energy security, technological innovation and the expanding role of artificial intelligence. (Efrat Lachter/News Media)
The issue of human oversight was also at the heart of Altman’s remarks at ADIPEC.
During a panel discussion, he said AI should remain a tool that serves people rather than a substitute for human judgment.
Altman also acknowledged a central problem for the technology industry: increasingly powerful AI systems require enormous amounts of energy.
Asked to name his biggest challenge, Altman gave a one-word answer: “Energy.”
The exchange highlighted the increasingly complicated relationship between two industries that are becoming reliant on one another.
AI companies require huge volumes of electricity to run data centers, while energy producers are turning to AI to boost efficiency, improve production and spot vulnerabilities before they threaten supplies.
Racks of graphics processing units, or GPUs, with a closed-loop liquid cooling system inside an operational Microsoft data center. (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
The stakes are especially high in the Gulf, where the war involving Iran and interruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have forced energy producers to rethink how they protect infrastructure and keep supplies moving to global markets.
In his opening address, Al Jaber said nearly 1 billion barrels had been withdrawn from global oil inventories since the disruption of Hormuz, underscoring how quickly geopolitical turmoil can reverberate through energy markets.
The ADNOC chief described AI as one part of a wider strategy to improve operational resilience. Companies, he argued, must build systems that can identify and anticipate problems rather than merely respond once a disruption has occurred.
The exhibition floor at ADIPEC 2026 in Abu Dhabi, where global energy companies presented new technologies and innovations amid concerns about energy security and regional instability. (Efrat Lachter/News Media)
Altman, for his part, praised the UAE’s commitment to deploying AI across government and industry, calling it the world’s most forward-looking country in adopting the technology.
For Abu Dhabi, the emerging alliance between its established energy sector and leading AI companies offers a way to expand its economic influence beyond oil exports.
Whether those investments produce the promised gains in productivity, energy security and technological innovation, however, remains uncertain.
AI data center. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
As the ADIPEC discussions made clear, the key issue is no longer only how much energy the AI revolution will consume. It is also whether artificial intelligence can help address the energy challenges that its own expansion is creating.