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G42 (legally Group 42 Holding Ltd) is an artificial intelligence and cloud computing holding company headquartered in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that functions as the Emirates' national AI champion. Founded in 2018 and chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security adviser and a brother of President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the group is led by chief executive Peng Xiao and reports more than 25,000 employees across over 30 countries [1][4]. G42's subsidiaries span data centers, sovereign cloud, language models, healthcare, analytics, cybersecurity and space. Internationally it is best known for a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft in April 2024 [2], a multi-year supercomputing alliance with Cerebras, the open Arabic large language model Jais, and its role building Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI cluster developed with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco and SoftBank [3].
G42 was established in Abu Dhabi in 2018 and grew rapidly through acquisitions, joint ventures and sovereign backing. The company describes its mission as building an "Intelligence Grid," an interconnected infrastructure for delivering AI services on demand, and reports more than 25,000 employees and operations in over 30 countries [4]. Its disclosed backers include the Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala, which took a stake in 2020, the US private equity firm Silver Lake, which invested $800 million for a minority position in 2021, Microsoft, and the Dalio Family Office [1][4][32].
The group sits at the center of the UAE's strategy of converting energy wealth into AI infrastructure while positioning the country between Washington and Beijing. After years of deep commercial ties to Chinese technology firms, G42 divested its Chinese holdings in early 2024 under US pressure and re-anchored itself to American partners, a pivot that culminated in the Microsoft investment, the Stargate UAE project and US export licenses for advanced NVIDIA chips [1][3].
G42 operates as a holding group. As of June 2026 its portfolio comprises nine operating companies [5]:
| Company | Focus | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core42 | Sovereign cloud and AI compute infrastructure | Formed by merging G42 Cloud, the IT services firm Injazat and the Inception unit [6] |
| Inception | Applied AI models and products | Later re-established as a standalone company; co-developed the Jais models [5] |
| Khazna Data Centers | Data center development and operation | Describes itself as the largest operator in the UAE and Middle East, with over 70 percent UAE market share [5] |
| Presight | Big-data analytics | Listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange in 2023 |
| M42 | Tech-enabled healthcare | Formed in 2023 by combining G42 Healthcare with Mubadala Health |
| Space42 | Space technology and geospatial AI | Created through the 2024 merger of Bayanat and the satellite operator Yahsat |
| AIQ | AI for the energy sector | Joint venture with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) |
| CPX | Cybersecurity | |
| Astra Tech | Consumer technology and fintech | Operates the Botim communications app |
Core42, the cloud and compute arm, was launched at the GITEX 2023 conference in October 2023 by merging G42 Cloud (founded 2021), the formerly named Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (founded 2018) and the IT services firm Injazat (acquired 2020) into a single national-scale platform for sovereign cloud, generative AI and cybersecurity [6].
On April 15, 2024, Microsoft announced a $1.5 billion strategic investment in G42, taking a minority stake, with Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith joining G42's board of directors [1][2]. Under the agreement G42 committed to running its AI applications and services on Microsoft Azure, and the two companies agreed to establish a $1 billion fund to support developers in emerging markets [2]. The deal is underpinned by an Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement between the US and UAE governments, described by the companies as a first of its kind, with binding commitments on AI security, export compliance and safeguards against technology diversion [2].
The investment followed months of negotiation shaped by US national security concerns over G42's Chinese ties. Bloomberg reported that G42 had reached a confidential agreement with the US government to divest from China before the Microsoft deal was completed [7]. The partnership deepened in 2025: on November 3, 2025 the US Commerce Department approved export licenses allowing Microsoft to ship advanced NVIDIA processors to the UAE for data centers operated with G42 [8].
In July 2023 G42 and Cerebras Systems announced Condor Galaxy, a planned network of nine interconnected AI supercomputers with a combined 36 exaFLOPs of AI compute [9]. The first system, Condor Galaxy 1 in Santa Clara, California, linked 64 Cerebras CS-2 systems into a 4 exaFLOP, 54-million-core machine and was completed in November 2023, with Condor Galaxy 2 following in Stockton, California [9][10]. In March 2024 the partners broke ground on Condor Galaxy 3 in Dallas, Texas, built from 64 CS-3 systems based on the Wafer-Scale Engine 3 and adding 8 exaFLOPs, bringing the network to 16 exaFLOPs [11].
The relationship made G42 by far Cerebras's largest customer: the chipmaker's 2024 IPO filing disclosed that G42 accounted for 87 percent of its revenue in the first half of 2024 [12]. A planned $335 million share purchase by G42 triggered a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, forcing Cerebras to shelve its 2024 listing; the review was resolved in March 2025 after the terms were restructured so that G42 would hold only non-voting shares [13]. Cerebras ultimately listed on Nasdaq on May 14, 2026, raising $5.55 billion at $185 per share in the largest US tech IPO since Uber's 2019 debut; the stock closed its first day up about 68 percent, valuing the company near $95 billion [12]. By that point G42's share of Cerebras revenue had fallen to about 24 percent in 2025 from 85 percent in 2024 as the customer base broadened [12]. Condor Galaxy machines were used to train several G42 models, including Jais-30B and the clinical model Med42 [11].
On May 15, 2025, during US President Donald Trump's visit to Abu Dhabi, the two governments unveiled plans for a 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus, a roughly 10-square-mile site billed as the largest AI infrastructure deployment outside the United States, with G42 leading design and construction [14]. The visit also produced the US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership, a government-to-government framework for AI cooperation [14][15].
One week later, on May 22, 2025, G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco and SoftBank announced Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI compute cluster inside the campus and the first international deployment of OpenAI's Stargate program, with the first 200 megawatts targeted to come online in 2026 [3][16]. G42 is building the facility, which OpenAI and Oracle will operate; NVIDIA is supplying Grace Blackwell GB300-generation systems and Cisco is providing networking and security [16]. Stargate UAE is the first partnership under OpenAI's "OpenAI for Countries" initiative, and OpenAI has said the site could serve users within a 2,000-mile radius covering up to half the world's population [3]. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman framed the deployment as a model for spreading AI infrastructure beyond the United States: "By establishing the world's first Stargate outside of the U.S. in the UAE, we're transforming a bold vision into reality." [31]
Construction has moved quickly. G42 reported in October 2025 that the first phase had advanced from design to construction on an accelerated schedule [17], and in December 2025 Mubadala chief executive Khaldoon Al Mubarak said the 200-megawatt first phase, developed by Khazna, would be completed in the third quarter of 2026, with more than 5,000 workers on site [18]. In November 2025 the US Commerce Department authorized exports to G42 of advanced US chips equivalent to up to 35,000 NVIDIA GB300 Blackwell units, conditioned on security and reporting requirements, alongside a parallel approval for Saudi Arabia's Humain [19][20].
G42 entered model building through Inception and its academic partner, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). In August 2023 the partners and Cerebras released Jais, an open-source 13-billion-parameter Arabic-English model named after Jebel Jais, the UAE's highest peak, trained on Condor Galaxy 1 using a 395-billion-token dataset that combined 116 billion Arabic tokens with 279 billion English tokens to strengthen cross-language transfer [21]. A 30-billion-parameter version followed in November 2023, and in December 2025 Inception, Cerebras and MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models released Jais 2, a 70-billion-parameter open-weight model with improved handling of Modern Standard Arabic, regional dialects and code-switching [22].
In September 2025 MBZUAI and G42 launched K2 Think, a 32-billion-parameter open-source reasoning system that the partners said matched the performance of flagship reasoning models many times its size [23]. G42 has also built domain-specific models such as Med42 for clinical applications [11]. On the deployment side, G42 signed a partnership with OpenAI in October 2023, announced at the GITEX conference, to roll out OpenAI's models across the Middle East with regional inferencing run on Azure infrastructure [24].
G42's history is inseparable from the UAE's security establishment and from US-China technology competition. Before G42, Peng Xiao ran Pegasus, a subsidiary of the Emirati cybersecurity contractor DarkMatter, and he reportedly renounced his US citizenship for Emirati citizenship [25]. In December 2019 The New York Times reported that ToTok, a popular messaging app linked to G42, which was reported to be its sole registered shareholder, was used by the UAE government for mass surveillance; Apple and Google removed the app from their stores [26].
Through 2023 the company's China ties drew escalating scrutiny. G42 had run COVID-19 testing and vaccine programs with the Chinese firms BGI and Sinopharm in 2020, used Huawei equipment in its infrastructure, and in March 2023 bought a stake of roughly $100 million in ByteDance [25][27]. In January 2024 Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asked the Commerce Department to consider Entity List designations for G42 and affiliated companies, citing alleged links to Chinese military and intelligence-connected firms, allegations G42 rejected [28]. The following month Xiao said G42 had divested all of its Chinese investments, with its $10 billion investment arm 42XFund selling stakes including ByteDance, and confirmed the company was phasing out Huawei hardware [1][7]. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Xiao acknowledged the break was difficult, describing the decision to cut ties with Chinese partners as "not easy." [7]
The May 2025 AI Acceleration Partnership reportedly contemplated allowing the UAE to import up to 500,000 advanced NVIDIA chips per year, with about 20 percent earmarked for G42, although implementation stalled for months amid continuing diversion concerns in Washington [15][29]. The November 2025 Commerce licenses to Microsoft and G42 broke the logjam [8][19], and the two governments held the first interagency working group meeting of the partnership in April 2026 [30]. G42 is frequently cited as the central test case for US efforts to bind Gulf AI ambitions to American technology while keeping advanced chips out of Chinese hands.