G42 gave up Huawei, then let Washington watch its data centres. Majority US ownership is reportedly next.

Executives at Abu Dhabi’s G42 have held exploratory talks about selling a majority stake to American companies, Bloomberg reported on Friday, as the firm races to guarantee access to advanced chips beyond next year. Alex Dooler, Zainab Fattah and Dinesh Nair sourced the account to people familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the information is confidential.

G42 can buy cutting-edge chips without a US licence only until around April 2027 and needs to change its corporate structure to continue, according to Bloomberg, with options including an American majority shareholder or a new vehicle established in the US. No final decisions have been made, and TNW has not independently verified the talks.

A G42 representative told Bloomberg the company is focused on executing its long-term growth strategy and does not comment on confidential discussions or potential transactions. That is a declination rather than a denial.

What is already documented

The talks are unconfirmed, but the sequence leading to them is a matter of public record. G42 has made three escalating concessions to keep buying American chips, and each one bought a permission rather than a settlement.

The first was China. Microsoft invested $1.5bn in G42 in April 2024 and took a board seat, after G42 stripped Huawei equipment out of its operations and moved workloads onto Azure.

Microsoft described the deal as backed by a first-of-its-kind binding agreement with the US and UAE governments. It also gave an American company audit rights over how an Emirati one used the technology.

The second concession was visibility

By February, G42 was building monitoring of its own infrastructure to Washington’s specification. Jacob Helberg, US undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and environment, told a congressional hearing that the company had agreed to build a common operating picture.

Its purpose, in his account, was to let American policymakers confirm that G42-owned clusters in the UAE were not being accessed in ways that breached US export rules. Helberg called the system “unprecedented” and said it might scale across the Pax Silica coalition, as Valentina Pasquali reported for AGBI.

Set that against how these controls normally operate. Washington has been closing loopholes by following corporate nationality rather than the address on the loading dock, and G42 volunteered to be watched instead.

The third was geopolitical

In July the US moved the UAE out of the export-control tier containing China and Yemen into the one with India, South Korea and European states. Commerce said the change recognised the country’s status as a major defence partner and its support for US national security interests, naming Operation Epic Fury.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, G42’s chairman and the UAE’s national security adviser, approached the White House directly after the Iran war began. Charlotte Trueman set out the reclassification for DatacenterDynamics.

The reward was licence-free purchasing of Nvidia and AMD hardware. It is also the permission now approaching its expiry.

Influence was never the same as control

Here is what makes the reported talks a genuine break rather than more of the same. G42 already has serious American investors, counting Microsoft and private equity firm Silver Lake alongside Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s $385bn wealth fund, on Bloomberg’s account.

US capital inside the company has not been sufficient. What Bloomberg describes as under discussion now is US ownership of it, which is a different proposition entirely.

The wider pledge has not been sufficient either. The UAE says it is ahead of schedule on investing $1.4 trillion in America, foreign trade minister Thani Al Zeyoudi told Bloomberg in July, while dismissing security hawks who argue Gulf chip exports open a route to China.

Those hawks have had material to work with. US officials have separately worried that a gap in the rules let Chinese firms buy Blackwell-class servers through overseas subsidiaries, which is the diversion risk the whole architecture exists to close.

Why a rolling clock forces the question

An April 2027 horizon is the entire problem. No operator can underwrite a multi-gigawatt buildout on access that has to be re-earned, and G42 is building a 5GW UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi on Nvidia silicon.

The near-term numbers are already large. G42 was cleared for 35,000 Nvidia GB300-class systems in November 2025 against a partnership permitting up to 500,000 of Nvidia’s latest chips a year, and chief executive Peng Xiao said in January that first deliveries would bring online the initial 200MW of a planned 1GW Stargate cluster.

Ownership is attractive because it is the only structure that does not need renewing. It converts a licence into a property right.

The question Congress already asked

Not everyone in Washington reads the arrangement as clean. Democrats at the same February hearing raised the purchase of 49% of World Liberty Financial, a Trump family cryptocurrency venture, by a company linked to Sheikh Tahnoon, made shortly before the president returned to office and months before the chip approvals.

Helberg rejected the implication, saying it assumed the UAE had obtained technology it could not otherwise have had, which he called untrue because the US wants to export AI chips. He said the China ties had been severed to the best of his knowledge after thorough due diligence.

TNW sets out the sequence without asserting a connection, and no finding of improper conduct has been made against any party.

What this says about export control

Chip diplomacy began as a question of which processors could go where. It is becoming a question of who owns the company holding them, which is a far deeper intervention in another state’s industrial strategy.

The Gulf shows it first because the sums are largest. Regional AI infrastructure already turns on capital and permission rather than chip supply, and ownership is the next lever along that line.

The exposure is not only regulatory. Iran has threatened OpenAI’s $30bn Stargate site in Abu Dhabi, so whoever ends up owning these clusters inherits a physical risk alongside the compliance one.

What to watch

The obvious question is who buys. A US majority holder in an Emirati national champion chaired by the president’s brother would be an unusual asset, and such a deal would draw scrutiny in both capitals.

The larger question is whether this becomes the template. If licence-free access ultimately requires American owners, every national AI champion outside the US faces the same choice, and China has been weighing export controls on its own models and chips along the same logic.

G42 has spent two years demonstrating it can be trusted with American technology. The talks Bloomberg describes suggest that trust, however thoroughly proven, still comes with a renewal date.