G42: Abu Dhabi’s AI Champion and What It Actually Builds

Microsoft has committed to spending USD 15.2 billion in the UAE between 2023 and 2029. Its vice chair
sits on the board of an Abu Dhabi company. The US government wrote a bespoke, binding agreement to make
the arrangement possible, and then licensed the export of the equivalent of more than 80,000 Nvidia
accelerators into the country.

The company at the centre of all of that is G42. Microsoft calls it, in its own
words, “the UAE’s sovereign AI company.” It is also one of the most consistently misdescribed businesses
in the Gulf, partly because it has restructured so often that half the entities people name no longer
exist.

What G42 actually is

G42 is a holding group. It does not build one product; it owns operating companies that do. Its own
company page currently lists nine of them.

Two names you will still see in circulation are retired. G42 Healthcare no longer exists as a
separate brand — it was folded into M42. G42 Cloud no longer exists either —
that business now sits inside Core42. Both names still appear on third-party pages and, in one case, on
another Abu Dhabi government-linked site’s tenant list. They are not current entities.

The group is led by chief executive Peng Xiao. On its own About page, G42 names its backers directly:
“our growth is powered by world-class investors: Mubadala, SilverLake, Microsoft, and the Dalio Family
Office.” What none of them publish is a percentage — G42 discloses no ownership split, no valuation, no
revenue and no headcount, and anyone quoting those figures is not getting them from the company.

The Microsoft relationship

This is the part with genuine geopolitical weight, and the dates matter.

On 15 April 2024, Microsoft announced it would invest USD 1.5 billion in G42 for a minority stake, and
that Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, would join G42’s board. The deal came with what
Microsoft called a “first-of-its-kind binding agreement” — an Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement,
developed in close consultation with both the UAE and US governments.

That agreement is the mechanism. American frontier AI technology does not move into a jurisdiction
outside the US without one, and the fact that a bespoke instrument had to be written for G42 tells you
how the relationship is understood in Washington.

In November 2025 Brad Smith set out the full scale. “Microsoft will invest $15.2 billion USD in the
UAE between the start of this initiative in 2023 and the end of this decade, in 2029. This is not money
raised in the UAE. It’s money we’re spending in the UAE.”

The compute matters as much as the money. Earlier export licences, Microsoft says, allowed it to
accumulate in the UAE the equivalent of 21,500 Nvidia A100 GPUs, using a mix of A100, H100 and H200
chips. New licences approved in September 2025 permit shipment of the equivalent of a further 60,400
A100 chips — in that case using Nvidia’s more advanced GB300 GPUs. Our analysis of
Abu Dhabi’s
USD 100 billion AI bet through MGX covers the capital side of the same strategy, and our overview of
the UAE’s AI
Strategy 2031 sets out the policy frame around it.

The supercomputers

G42’s compute partnership with Cerebras produced the Condor Galaxy network.

CG-1, announced on 20 July 2023, is a 4 exaFLOPS, 54-million-core, 64-node AI
supercomputer, built in partnership with G42 and located at the Colovore data centre in Santa Clara,
California. CG-3, announced on 13 March 2024, delivers 8 exaFLOPs with 58 million
AI-optimised cores across 64 Cerebras CS-3 systems, sited in Dallas, Texas, bringing the network total to
16 exaFLOPs.

Cerebras said at the CG-1 launch that it would be the first of a series of nine supercomputers
totalling 36 exaFLOPS. That was a plan announced in July 2023, and it is worth treating as one: only
CG-1, CG-2 and CG-3 are publicly documented. The nine-machine figure gets repeated as though the network
were built.

Note also what the geography says. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign AI champion built its first two documented
supercomputers in California and Texas.

Jais, and why it matters

The most culturally consequential thing G42 has produced is a language model.

Jais, announced on 30 August 2023, was a 13-billion-parameter Arabic model trained on
116 billion Arabic tokens and 279 billion English tokens, built by Inception with MBZUAI and Cerebras,
trained on Condor Galaxy 1, and open-sourced on Hugging Face.

Jais 2 followed on 9 December 2025 — 70 billion parameters, described by MBZUAI as
the world’s leading open-weight Arabic large language model, built by Inception, Cerebras and MBZUAI’s
Institute of Foundation Models, and both trained and served on Cerebras systems.

Open-weight is the operative word. A region that imports almost all of its frontier AI has produced a
model in its own language that anyone can download. Our piece on
Arabic AI models including Falcon
and Jais covers the wider field, and our
expert view on the GCC’s AI
ambitions weighs how far it goes.

The pieces underneath

Core42 runs the compute. Its sovereign AI cloud is deliberately silicon-agnostic,
spanning Nvidia, AMD, Cerebras and Qualcomm accelerators — a hedge that looks smarter every time export
policy shifts. Its platforms include Compass for generative AI enablement, Insight for sovereign control
built with Microsoft Azure, and Signature Private Cloud.

Presight is the one you can buy. It listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange in
March 2023 in an IPO that was 136 times oversubscribed and raised USD 496 million, and reported FY-25
revenue of AED 3.03 billion, up 36.9% year on year. Our guide to
investing on ADX covers
the exchange itself.

M42 was established in 2023 by combining G42 Healthcare with Mubadala Health. It now
operates more than 480 facilities in 27 countries with over 20,000 employees — which makes the health
arm, by headcount and footprint, the largest thing in the group.

Space42 came from the merger of Bayanat and Yahsat, whose boards recommended the
combination on 20 December 2023, creating what G42 describes as an AI-powered space technology champion
in the MENA region.

What it adds up to

G42 is best understood not as a technology company but as a piece of national infrastructure with a
corporate structure — compute, cloud, health data, satellites, cybersecurity and a national language
model, held together under one roof and financed partly by an American software company under a treaty-
adjacent agreement.

Whether that is a durable model is the open question. It depends on export policy staying favourable,
on the Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement holding, and on Abu Dhabi continuing to fund at this scale.
The infrastructure it sits on is being built alongside it — see our guides to
Masdar City,
Hub71 and
ADGM, the financial
centre where much of the capital behind it is domiciled.

Primary sources: G42’s own
companies list and
About page;
Core42,
Presight and
M42;
Microsoft’s announcements of the
G42
partnership and its
USD
15.2 billion UAE investment; Cerebras on
Condor
Galaxy 1 and
Condor
Galaxy 3; and MBZUAI on
Jais
2.