Riyadh – Mubasher: Ahmad Al Khowaiter, the Executive Vice President for Technology and Innovation at Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco), highlighted how three factors are helping the entity get ahead and stay ahead, during his speech at the four-day LEAP 2025 event.
Al Khowaiter noted that the real challenge is not to develop AI applications, but how to scale it across industrial sized operations, not just to utilise it, but maximise value. He stated that this requires three main elements, three main enablers:
One is tremendous amounts of real-world data. You need the data first.
Then you need to put in place computing power, computing infrastructure, to be able to do the models, although recently, given DeepSeek’s success, maybe not as much as we thought before.
But finally, and probably the most important element which I think we tend to forget in our excitement around technology, is you need the talent, you need the subject matter experts who can tell you if the model is telling the truth or not.
Al Khowaiter added: “We at Aramco are proponents of technology, developing, deploying and driving cutting edge innovation. Not only because our main products, energy and chemicals are essential for the technology our world depends on, but because we recognize the immense power technology has to transform our own industry and the world.”
Technology has driven so much change over the last 100 years. But, the advent of AI and big data is taking us into a new world with almost limitless opportunity at a pace I don’t believe we have ever seen before, stated Aramco’s official.
Reliability Cost in Certain Conditions
Al Khowaiter noted that AI and big data both are helping the environment of Aramco’s business by improving sustainability. He stated: “It is helping our people, by improving safety. And it is helping our customers, by improving reliability.”
Reliability alone, in unplanned downtime and equipment failures cost industries across the world about $1 trillion globally. So that’s about equal to the GDP of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, roughly.
The official elaborated, so new AI models allow us to predict the future health of equipment and minimise failures before they happen, as one small example.
Not only does this mean increased equipment availability, but also reduced impact on the environment. So, our use of AI starts at exploration.
He added: “We are using old seismic data, which we utilised in the past and reprocessing it with AI and we are now able to generate new results from old data, which creates great savings.”
In production it means we can be more accurate and we are able to drive our drilling operations autonomously to be able to maximize production, reducing costs and reducing emissions.
We have more than 90 years of propriety data from our extensive geological, seismic and process surveys and every day we collect information from 10 billion data points across our facilities, which goes straight to our engineering solutions center.
All of this helps us to optimisze our performance. And this was recognized recently, yet again, with an unprecedented Fifth Global Lighthouse Award from the World Economic Forum, this time for our North Ghawar Oil Producing Complex.
We are the only international energy company to have more than three of these awards, which recognize the adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies.
And when it comes to computing power, we have investing heavily recently.
The official added that Aramco recently increased its data storage capacity to 1,500 petabytes, noting “We doubled our data center power. We operate a diverse set of supercomputers, including Dammam 7, one of the fastest in the region and a number of NVIDIA Superpods.”
During the LEAP event this year, Deloitte unveiled a comprehensive Silicon-2-Service (S2S) offering through a partnership with NVIDIA.
In 2024, Aramco announced its partnership with Groq to deliver the first AI inferencing centre in the region and “I’m glad to say we together we have delivered on time and on budget.”
Last year Aramco also announced the launch of aramcoMETABRAIN, the world’s first industrial Large Language Model. Today it is serving our business with a 70 billion parameter model and I’m excited to say we have a one trillion parameter model in development.
And as DeepSeek showed, building capable AI models isn’t limited to global tech companies. It is within reach of enterprises, even start-ups, to design AI suited to their own businesses.
We have believed this from the beginning, developing our own models with our own data.
Aramco’s Latest Innovation
Al Khowaiter introduced the latest innovation by Aramco, Plant METABRAIN, a time series transformer model, utilising large time series data sets.
He elaborated: “Using these data sets we’re able to model the process, the real time processes that underly our operations and we are able to provide actionable insight to operators, engineers and scientists. By working in real time, and with minimal user input, it will also anticipate demand, optimize operations, predict product quality and maximize production.”
At Aramco, “we believe our AI is only as good as our HI, or Human Intelligence.”
This is why we are training more than 6,000 AI developers across the company and are working with world leading institutions like Imperial College, Caltech, and KAUST to put hundreds of our employees through advanced degree courses.
The official noted that AI and data centres currently consume about 3% of global electricity demand. Estimates predict this demand may double by the end of the decade.
Training was perceived to be a huge energy consumer, but by bringing down the cost of training in many ways we’ve created a bigger market, because that makes the use and inference of the models much more affordable for much larger consumption around the world.
Aramco is well placed to help meet this increased demand for affordable, reliable and sustainable energy.
Our investments in lower carbon technology like Carbon Capture and Storage, hydrogen and renewables can help to lower the carbon footprint of this growth in demand; the development of all of course been enabled and accelerated by AI.
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