G42

G42 was founded in Abu Dhabi in 2018, starting as a 30-person team and positioning itself as an artificial intelligence and cloud computing technology company; by 2023 it had more than 22,000 employees from more than 85 nationalities.⁠[1][1][1]

In January 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, G42 launched a humanitarian initiative supplying hundreds of thousands of units of surgical masks, medical gloves, goggles, and protective clothing to healthcare workers in China. On March 31, G42 and the Chinese genomics company BGI announced a massive-throughput COVID-19 testing laboratory in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, capable of tens of thousands of tests a day; it was built in only 14 days and was the first lab of its scale to operate outside China.⁠[2][2][3][3][3]

In June 2020, G42 and Sinopharm launched what they called the world’s first Phase III clinical trial of an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine, and G42 later established Hayat Biotech to produce the first COVID-19 vaccine made in the Arab world.⁠[4][1][1]

After the signing of the Abraham Accords, G42 in 2020 became the first UAE-based company to establish an office in Israel.⁠[4][5]

G42 announced the acquisition of the digital transformation services company Injazat and the data center company Khazna, both previously nurtured by MubadalaMubadala Investment CompanyMubadala Investment Company (Mubadala) is a sovereign investor wholly owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi. It was formed in 2017 by the merger of the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), founded in 1984, and Mubadala Development Company, founded in 2002, and absorbed the Abu Dhabi Investment Council the following year; as of the end of 2025 it managed about AED 1.4 trillion (US$385 billion) in assets, with business in more than 80 countries.Open the full entry, with Mubadala becoming an investor in G42; Mubadala CEO Khaldoon Al Mubarak said the deal was consistent with its strategy of investing in next-generation technology companies.⁠[6][6][6]

The technology investment firm Silver Lake announced a substantial investment in G42, and its co-CEO Egon Durban joined G42’s board. The board at the time was chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan and also included G42 Group CEO Peng Xiao, Abu Dhabi Department of Finance Chairman Jassem Mohamed Obaid Bu Ataba Al Zaabi, and Mubadala CEO Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak.⁠[5][5][5]

G42’s big data and AI analytics company Presight AI listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, raising about $496 million in its initial public offering, which was oversubscribed 136 times, with International Holding Company as cornerstone investor.⁠[7][7]

On April 10, 2023, G42 and Microsoft signed a memorandum of understanding to develop cloud solutions for the public sector and industries such as healthcare, energy, and finance. On April 17, G42 and Mubadala combined their healthcare businesses to launch the technology-enabled healthcare company M42.⁠[8][8][9]

G42 and the U.S. chip company Cerebras Systems launched Condor Galaxy, a network of nine interconnected AI supercomputers with a planned combined training capacity of 36 exaFLOPs; the first, CG-1, had 4 exaFLOPs, and the two planned to deploy CG-2 and CG-3 in the United States by the end of that year.⁠[10][10][10][10]

In November 2023, it was reported that U.S. national security personnel had warned G42 and Emirati intelligence officials of concerns that China could use its relationship with G42 to gain access to advanced AI technology and even to Americans’ genetic information through donated COVID tests. At the time G42 had business ties to BGI Genomics and held $100 million worth of shares in TikTok owner ByteDance.⁠[11][11][11][11]

In December, G42 announced it would phase out hardware purchases from Chinese suppliers such as Huawei in favor of U.S. suppliers. CEO Peng Xiao said that as a commercial company “we cannot work with both sides,” and that the company had always handled data carefully, ensuring there was no leakage of sensitive information from its data center link in the United States.⁠[11][11][11][11]

Abu Dhabi’s Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council announced the creation of the AI investment company MGXMGXMGX is an Abu Dhabi artificial intelligence and advanced technology investment company, announced in March 2024 by Abu Dhabi’s Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council with Mubadala and G42 as foundational partners and chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. It has invested in companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Databricks, and Binance, and co-founded the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) with BlackRock, Microsoft, and others.Open the full entry with G42 and Mubadala as foundational partners, and G42 CEO Peng Xiao became a director of MGX; the two had already jointly developed Khazna into a data center leader, launched M42, and created the geospatial technology company Space42.⁠[12][12][12]

In April 2024, Microsoft announced a $1.5 billion investment in G42; Microsoft President Brad Smith joined G42’s board, and G42 would use Microsoft’s Azure cloud for its AI applications. The agreement was reached after consultation with the UAE and U.S. governments.⁠[13][13][13]

According to people familiar with the matter, G42 had earlier negotiated with the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security and reached an understanding in 2023 to pare back its presence in China and pivot to U.S. technology, in exchange for continued access to U.S. technology such as Nvidia chips; a G42 spokesman said the decision to divest from China was driven by a desire to partner with the world’s most sophisticated AI companies and that the company was making the transition in a verifiable way. G42 had previously come under congressional scrutiny over its ties to the blacklisted Huawei and BGI, with a lawmaker calling for sanctions; G42 “categorically” denied having connections to the Chinese government and its military industrial complex.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13]

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Ruler of Abu Dhabi and chairman of G42, chaired G42’s year-end board meeting, attended by directors including Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, Jassem Mohamed Bu Ataba Al Zaabi, Brad Smith, Egon Durban, Peng Xiao, and Martin Edelman; the board highlighted the $15.2 billion strategic investment by Microsoft, a minority shareholder in G42, and planned to expand agentic AI deployment and safety frameworks in healthcare, finance, government services, and industry.⁠[14][14][14][14]

In February 2026, G42 announced it would build a national-scale supercomputer with 8 exaflops of capacity for India with Cerebras, the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, for use by Indian businesses and government ministries. On May 15, during Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Abu Dhabi, G42 and the Government of India formalized the framework and commercial terms for Condor Galaxy India, a cluster of 64 Cerebras CS-3 systems.⁠[15][15][15][15][16][16][17]

The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security placed the UAE in Country Group A:5 and approved G42 and Core42 as authorized recipients of advanced computing items under the U.S.-UAE AI framework; G42 called it an important milestone in the U.S.-UAE technology partnership and said it would continue to maintain rigorous safeguards.⁠[4][4][4]

As of October 2026, G42’s companies include the energy AI company AIQ (a joint venture of Presight and ADNOC), the fintech company Astra Tech, the cloud and infrastructure company Core42, the cybersecurity company CPX, the AI products company Inception42, Khazna, the data center platform with more than 70% of the market in the UAE and the Middle East, the healthcare technology company M42, the data analytics company Presight, and the space technology company Space42, listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange.⁠[18][18][18][18][18][18][18][18][18]

G42 lists its investors as Mubadala, Silver Lake, Microsoft, and the Dalio Family Office. Group CEO Peng Xiao spent about a decade at MicroStrategyStrategyStrategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is a Nasdaq-listed company (ticker MSTR) headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia, United States, founded in 1989 by Michael Saylor and originally built on enterprise analytics software. Since 2020, the company has used bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset and describes itself as the world’s first and largest Bitcoin Treasury Company; as of September 27, 2026, it held 847,666 bitcoins. Its current Chief Executive Officer is Phong Le.Open the full entry as Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Information Officer; Mansoor Al Mansoori, CEO of G42 International, leads the group’s international expansion, including projects such as the UAE–US 5GW AI Campus and Stargate UAE; and Marty Edelman is a board member and general counsel of G42 USA.⁠[19][19][19][19][19]

G42: Official website: https://www.g42.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/g42ai (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/group42ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]