The Invisible Engine: How G42’s Intelligence Grid Is Set To Rewire Everyday Life
From smart hospitals to adaptive traffic and real-time public services, G42 is building an ambient AI layer designed to quietly enhance how societies operate, interact, and grow.
Imagine a city that thinks alongside you.
Hospitals that anticipate your arrival. Roads that re-route before congestion builds up. Emergency responders guided not just by instinct, but by satellite data and real-time intelligence. Services that don’t feel like systems at all—but like intuition, made visible.
This isn’t a product pitch or a sci-fi scenario. It’s the framing for what G42—the Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence and advanced technology group—is calling the Intelligence Grid.
From edge sensors and sovereign cloud systems to generative models and analytics tools, each component in this grid is designed to integrate and support a broader system. The aim is not automation for its own sake, but thoughtful coordination between people, machines, and data to improve how everyday systems function—often in ways that are seamless and unobtrusive.
This concept was front and center at Supercharged, G42’s flagship summit held earlier this month, which brought together over 2,400 employees, partners, and global heavyweights, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Brad Smith.
According to G42, the Intelligence Grid is a connected system of technologies designed to deliver intelligence, on demand and at scale. It’s not something you open or prompt, but something that underpins everything—as G42 put it, it’s “an invisible layer of intelligence” that’s accessible, sovereign, and woven directly into the systems that shape modern life.
What this means is AI that moves beyond the screen. Think public services that are responsive by default. Health systems that use predictive modeling to triage before a crisis. Smart mobility systems that reduce emissions through real-time adaptation. The Intelligence Grid, G42 says, is already enabling this kind of transformation across sectors—from energy to education to emergency response.
The stakes, economically, are enormous. By 2030, AI is projected to contribute up to 14 percent of the UAE’s gross domestic product (GDP)—an estimated US$100 billion. But for G42, the Intelligence Grid isn’t just a growth engine. It’s also an opportunity to build inclusively—to augment human potential, rather than replace it, and to ensure that the benefits of AI aren’t limited to the privileged few.
“Electricity was invented more than 140 years ago, yet today, millions of people across the Global South still live without reliable access to it,” Peng Xiao, Group CEO of G42, said in a statement. “As we now build the infrastructure through projects like Stargate UAE and the 5GW UAE-US AI Campus to distribute intelligence, we cannot afford to repeat that mistake. The Intelligence Grid must be designed from the outset to be inclusive, equitable, and universally accessible, so that the benefits of AI reach every corner of the world, not just the privileged few.”
That infrastructure is already being assembled, piece by piece, across the different companies that make up the G42 ecosystem. Data centers from Khazna, for instance. Cloud and compute capabilities via Core42. Foundation models developed by Inception. Cybersecurity through CPX. Data analytics from Presight. Geospatial intelligence via Space42. Sensors and edge computing with Analog. And consumer-facing applications through AstraTech.
It’s a deep bench, bolstered further by partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Cerebras, and reinforced by research initiatives with the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), as well as new Responsible AI Centers launched in collaboration with Microsoft.
But the Intelligence Grid isn’t a distant ambition. Xiao pointed out that it’s already sequencing over 800,000 genome samples to advance precision medicine. It’s already shaping financial oversight. It’s also supporting AI-led disaster response across the region. As Xiao put it: “This is what it means to operationalize intelligence at scale."
And if G42’s vision holds, this Grid—quiet, seamless, omnipresent—won’t just power the systems around us. It’ll become part of the fabric of life itself.
Pictured in the lead image is Peng Xiao, Group CEO of G42. Image courtesy G42.
