How Aramco is driving AI on an industrial scale

Aramco’s executive vice president of technology & innovation, Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, spoke at the LEAP 2025 tech event in Riyadh about the “limitless opportunity” presented by the rapid development of AI and big data

Al-Khowaiter highlighted the positive impact of AI solutions on sustainability, safety and reliability, adding that the real challenge is scaling AI applications across industrial sized operations to maximise value, requiring three main enablers: huge amounts of real-world data; computing power; and talent, ie subject matter experts.

“These three factors are helping Aramco get ahead, and stay ahead,” he remarked.

Three key enablers

“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 centre…And when it comes to computing power, we have investing heavily recently.

“We recently increased our data storage capacity to 1,500 petabytes and we doubled our data centre power. We operate a diverse set of supercomputers, including Dammam 7, one of the fastest in the region and a number of NVIDIA Superpods. Last year we announced our partnership with Groq to deliver the first AI inferencing centre in the region.

“Last year we 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.

“Which is why it gives me great pleasure to introduce our latest innovation, Plant METABRAIN, a time series transformer model, utilising large time series data sets. 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, optimise operations, predict product quality and maximise production.

“This frees our experts up to focus on more value-added tasks, rather than being busy with troubleshooting or developing models from the ground up.”

Al-Khowaiter outlined measures Aramco is taking to develop its “human intelligence” to maximise this data and infrastructure, training more than 6,000 AI developers across the company
and working with world leading institutions to educated its employees.

“We’re also using the engineers, scientists and operators we already have to work with those AI developers to train new models, making them more robust and more reliable,” he said.

Turning to the energy demand posed by AI, he commented that Aramco’s investments in lower carbon technology such as carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and renewables can help to lower the carbon footprint of this growth in demand.

Concluding, he said “Aramco is not only using our unique size and scale to maximise the use of AI on an industrial scale, but our decades worth of data and most importantly, our subject matter experts, the talent of people. That keeps the human experience and human ingenuity at the heart of all we do and will let us leap into a new world of industrial excellence.”

Collaboration for AI-enabled industrial smartphones

Also at LEAP, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Aramco Digital, the digital and technology subsidiary of Aramco announced their collaboration to develop the world’s first AI-enabled industrial 5G smartphones with native support for the 450MHz spectrum. Support for 450 MHz spectrum allows 5G IoT devices, edge computing and end-users to connect to a new generation of AI-enabled industrial applications, initially focusing on advanced industrial solutions for Aramco. Qualcomm Technologies and Aramco Digital previously announced the deployment of Aramco’s first generative AI industrial IoT solutions, which are improving operational safety, efficiency, and sustainability at Aramco sites. The new industrial smartphones will give Aramco users another way to connect to these advanced industrial applications.