companies

G42

Abu Dhabi AI and cloud conglomerate running Arabic-language models, sovereign cloud infrastructure and enterprise AI across 30+ countries.

G42 (formally Group 42 Holding) was founded in Abu Dhabi in 2018 and has grown from an AI and cloud computing startup into one of the largest AI conglomerates in the Middle East, chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan and run day-to-day by founder and Group CEO Peng Xiao. Rather than one product, G42 operates as an umbrella over a cluster of companies spanning AI research (Inception, developer of the Jais family of Arabic large language models), sovereign cloud and enterprise AI infrastructure (Core42), data centers (Khazna), and publicly listed AI/analytics unit Presight, with deployments across healthcare, government, energy and finance in more than 30 countries. The company's scale and geopolitical position have drawn heavy outside investment and scrutiny in roughly equal measure. In April 2024, Microsoft announced a $1.5 billion investment in G42, a deal bundled with commitments around US national-security safeguards and a shift away from some of G42's earlier Chinese hardware relationships; Mubadala, the UAE's sovereign wealth fund, and Silver Lake are also investors. Its Jais models, developed with Cerebras Systems and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, remain among the most capable openly released Arabic-centric LLMs, spanning sizes from 590 million to 70 billion parameters.

Founded

2018

Headquarters

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Sector

infrastructure