OpenAI surges to $500 billion valuation in share sale backed by Abu Dhabi

OpenAI has vaulted past Elon Musk’s SpaceX to become the world’s biggest startup after a share sale to investors including Abu Dhabi firm MGX valued the artificial intelligence giant at $500 billion.

Mubadala and G42-backed MGX, Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group, Dragoneer Investment Group and T. Rowe Price were among the named parties who bought $6.6 billion worth of stock from current and former employees.

The sale fell short of the $10 billion-plus limit on stock the company allowed for sale, potentially indicating the confidence of staff in the long-term trajectory of the business, Bloomberg reports.

It was the third major investment in OpenAI by MGX, which took part in a fundraising round earlier this year that valued the company at $300 billion, after making an initial investment in 2024.

OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman have a tight relationship with the UAE, where the company agreed earlier this year to partner with AI powerhouse G42, Oracle and Nvidia to build a 1-gigawatt computing cluster called Stargate UAE.

Altman met with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed and Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the National Security Adviser who oversees some $1.5 trillion in UAE assets, in Abu Dhabi on the weekend. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence at a ceremony on Friday.

UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoon meets Thrive’s Josh Kushner on AI

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, one of the UAE’s key corporate power brokers, met last week with Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, a major backer of Open AI.

“We discussed the latest developments in artificial intelligence and opportunities for collaboration to advance innovative technologies and solutions that support the growth and prosperity of various sectors,” Sheikh Tahnoon wrote in a Feb. 28 Instagram post.

Joshua Kushner is the founder and managing partner of New York-based Thrive, which invested more than $1 billion in OpenAI and has raised billions more for its venture capital funds. He is the brother of Jared Kushner, founder of Miami-based Affinity Partners and former White House Middle East advisor.

Sheikh Tahnoon is the UAE’s National Security Advisor, in addition to serving as Chairman of several Abu Dhabi-owned businesses that include International Holding Co., the ADQ sovereign wealth fund, Royal Group, First Abu Dhabi Bank and G42.

Presight’s data analytics help UAE’s biggest companies conquer AI fears

As the UAE carves out a role in developing artificial intelligence tools with Microsoft, Google and OpenAI, Abu Dhabi-based Presight is harnessing big data analytics to help governments, energy producers and other industrial giants sharpen their performance.

The $3.5 billion company got off the ground less than three years ago as a subsidiary of G42, the UAE’s umbrella AI firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed’s Royal Group and backed by the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund. Now, after a March 2023 IPO, it’s expanding through acquisitions, most recently buying a majority stake in AIQ, the data arm of national oil company ADNOC.

In an interview with The Circuit on the sidelines of the World Governments Summit in Dubai, Presight CEO Thomas Pramotedham said the company aims to decipher AI for some of the largest state-owned enterprises in the UAE and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa while breaking down hurdles to wider adoption. Before moving to Abu Dhabi, he was CEO of Esri Singapore, which helped build the city-state’s Smart Nation program using data analytics and digital know-how to improve government services.

“We fear something we don’t understand,” Pramotedham said. “We will continue to evolve AI but also bring other technologies and apply them in an impactful way, where the technology truly hits the ground running.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Circuit: How would you describe Presight’s mission and where do you see areas for growth?

Thomas Pramotedham: In my view, we’re definitely on the cusp of a transformation era. Presight has a very strong foundation in national platforms, applied technology, applied big data analytics and smart cities. And then, you have generative AI coming in for disruption.

We’re a company based in the UAE, focusing on the Global South – countries in Africa, Central Asia, and ASEAN. We focus on applying technology. That’s a key part of it. I believe AI will become more accessible, especially with recent advancements in open-source models that are more efficient.

Presight always operates on a national platform – we’re not really a B2B company. We work with large state-owned enterprises, primarily in Abu Dhabi, as their digital transformation and AI partner. That’s the trajectory I see. We will continue to evolve AI but also bring other technologies and apply them in an impactful way—where the technology truly hits the ground running.

Where does Presight fit in with the global energy transition?

There are two parts of the story. Either the rise of AI, everyone’s talking about where we are going to find the energy to support computing and no less so, buying the chips and creating the infrastructure. So that’s one part of the angle that we put in. The second part is this: the move from current energy transition into renewables is a journey that is taken. Our AIQ venture with ADNOC is really driven by ADNOC ‘s vision of AI in energy and energy for AI. What do I mean by that? AI is going to help the current energy operation transform, optimize, and therefore, they should be able to do more with less – and how do you achieve the requirement that is needed without an increased carbon footprint.

Then on the other side, [with Presight’s power-generation] “IntelliGrid” businesses, it’s really a transition of digitization or transmission and distribution network. So a smart grid, when you put the two together, what we’re expecting to see is soon traditional and renewable energy will interact. So you get two sources of energy providing, whether it’s compute or powering a city. Then what you really need is microgrids that are driven by AI algorithms that regulate this transmission. So really minimizing the wastage of electricity or optimizing, you know, how individual households consume electricity.

What are the key challenges in deploying AI at scale in critical infrastructure sectors like energy?

We are seeing a higher adoption of AI. We did for ADNOC, we launched the ENERGYai Large Language Model. It’s a generative AI workflow that helps optimize reservoir selections, seismic cube analysis, and in many ways, through AI automation, improves ADNOC’s upstream functions and workflows. So, helping energy companies optimize for better energy production.

On the city side, on the consumption of it, to work with cities, like what we’re doing now with Azerbaijan and many other countries, is really introducing a smart grid into the transmission networks that a country has. So it’s the adoption of the two. Of course, not every country. Power is still an issue. Electricity is not accessible to almost 700 million people around the world. But really, how do we bring this transition and make it available to developing or underdeveloped countries? It’s really one of the key ways to bridge the electricity divide – not just the digital divide, but the electricity divide.

How have you been actually limiting the electricity divide?

One is the work we’re doing with Azeri Gas. So, smart meter digitization is a piece of work that I think will continue. Through that, the optimization of transmission and distribution of utilities in the country can be improved. So that’s the work we do with IntelliGrid, our joint venture.

For, like I said, the acquisition of AIQ, it’s creating base models that can help not just large national oil and international oil companies but also small and medium oil companies optimize their operations. Using the models that we’re building with ADNOC, the model is trained on AdNoc, it’s applied to ADNOC. But the foundation model can be taken out to help a medium-sized oil company improve their production, improve their operations.

What impact will your work for ADNOC have on the broader industry?

I think ADNOC is an example of a large energy language model with agentic workflows that is converging with what we’ve seen in the last 18 months. So in 2023 and 2024, you heard a lot about large language models, and then last year, you heard a lot about agentic models. Large language models are foundation models that support broad queries. But when you specialize down to industrial language, that’s where agentic workflows come in.

So I could do the same at ADNOC and financial services. I could do it for the supply chain. I could do it for transportation, and what will happen is you get AI trained in a particular vertical, and from then, you develop different agents that help that vertical optimize itself. For example, the requirements I need in port operations and supply chains are quite different from the models I need in regular multimodal transportation.

Sam Altman: UAE could lead the formation of a global AI watchdog

OpenAI’s Sam Altman had two suggestions for the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Al Olama at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday.

Altman said that the UAE could be the world’s regulatory sandbox to experiment with AI technologies and the country is well placed to lead the formation of a global AI watchdog.

“It’s very hard to get all the regulatory ideas right in a vacuum,” Altman said while appearing via video, adding that allowing experimentation and running scenarios would make for better laws governing the fast-evolving technology.

The ChatGPT creator repeated a recommendation that both he and Al Olama have made in the past: that there should be an oversight body like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to address open existential questions. “What happens with the most powerful of these systems?” Altman said. “What sort of auditing, safety measures do we want in place before we deploy a super-intelligence?”

The conversation onstage comes as Altman looks to raise trillions of dollars to amass the semiconductors needed to power advanced AI, and is reportedly courting the UAE as an investor.

The UAE has made AI leadership, with Abu Dhabi-backed G42 at the forefront, the foundation of its economic transformation aims. As a result, the country has become a crossroads for some of the biggest players in AI.

Later this week Nvidia, in partnership with Microsoft, will host an event for generative AI content creators in Abu Dhabi. Founder Jensen Huang appeared at WGS on Monday.