Abu Dhabi's G42 courts US buyers to keep its AI chip pipeline open past 2027
Abu Dhabi's flagship AI company is shopping itself to Washington — and PUBG's parent is betting $250 million that India's AI appetite is real.
G42 is exploring selling a majority stake to an American company, or spinning out an entirely new US-based vehicle, to lock in continued access to advanced AI chips after April 2027. That's the framing in a Bloomberg report picked up by Techmeme on Friday. Two structures are reportedly on the table: a US majority shareholder for the existing company, or a separate American entity — no decisions yet. The eight-year-old firm, overseen by an influential member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, already counts Microsoft (a $1.5 billion minority stake and a board seat), Silver Lake, and Mubadala on its cap table. The April 2027 deadline matters because that's when the current US export-control regime around advanced AI chips for the Gulf states is set to expire, and the clock is forcing G42's hand. Bloomberg cites people familiar with the deliberations; the company has not publicly commented. This is a quieter but arguably more consequential version of the same logic that has the UAE pursuing sovereign US partnerships across the stack: Abu Dhabi is trading equity for supply-chain certainty, and the US is in the rare position of being able to name its price. Watch for a named US suitor, or a Commerce Department signal on renewability, before year-end — absent either, the 2027 clock forces a rushed deal on worse terms for Abu Dhabi.
Krafton, the South Korean studio behind PUBG, is plowing another $250 million into India over the next three to four years — pushing its total Indian investment past $500 million since 2021, with the new round explicitly aimed at AI and robotics. TechCrunch's Jagmeet Singh has the scoop, and the framing is the interesting part: this isn't a gaming expansion. The company is now positioning India as a base for AI work and physical-world robotics, an unusual pivot for a publisher that has historically been synonymous with a single battle royale. The $250 million lands in a year when Indian AI investment has become the loudest subplot in the global VC story — the country's deep bench of engineering talent and the government's willingness to negotiate on data centers have made it a magnet for capacity-hungry labs. Krafton's bet is small relative to the hyperscalers' Indian commitments, but it's notable for the company making it: a gaming-first studio telling the market that it sees India as an AI and robotics platform, not just a market for new maps. The next milestone to watch is whether Krafton starts disclosing which AI and robotics sub-fields get the bulk of the new money — Indian-language models, gaming-adjacent generative tooling, and humanoid robotics are all live candidates.
With the chip controls up for renewal and a Gulf sovereign willing to restructure ownership to clear them, the next twelve months of AI diplomacy may be shaped more in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh than in Brussels. Do you think Washington should be trading chip access for equity, or holding the line on pure export rules? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Bloomberg via Techmeme · Bloomberg summary (AI Weekly) · Yahoo Finance / Bloomberg · TechCrunch — Krafton · AI Weekly — Krafton · Yahoo Finance — Krafton
