Executives at Abu Dhabi-based AI company G42 have held exploratory talks about selling a majority stake to American companies, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Friday, as the firm races to guarantee access to advanced chips beyond next year. Options under discussion include an American majority shareholder or a new vehicle established in the United States. No final decisions have been made.
Under current U.S. rules, G42 can buy cutting-edge Nvidia and AMD chips without a licence only until around April 2027, Bloomberg reported. That window followed a July reclassification that moved the UAE into a friendlier export-control tier. A multi-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus buildout on Nvidia silicon cannot be underwritten on access that has to be re-earned every few years, the reporting notes.
G42 already has major U.S. capital: Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in 2024 and took a board seat after the company stripped Huawei gear and shifted workloads to Azure, and Silver Lake and Mubadala are also investors. Bloomberg’s sources say minority American capital has not been enough; the talks now concern ownership. A G42 representative told Bloomberg the company focuses on long-term growth and does not comment on confidential discussions or potential transactions.
The sequence tracks escalating concessions for chip permission: China divestment and Huawei removal for the Microsoft deal, then U.S.-specified monitoring of G42 data centers disclosed in February congressional testimony, then the July licence-free purchasing window now approaching expiry. Export control, in this frame, is shifting from which chips can ship where to who owns the company that holds them.
Nothing is signed. Any U.S. majority stake in an Emirati national champion chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan would draw scrutiny in both capitals. For now the story is the pressure system: permanent chip access is being priced as a corporate-structure problem.