NVIDIA and SLB to Preserve their Long-Standing Partnership, Propose New GenAI Solutions to Benefit the Energy Sector

At this point on our collective journey alongside artificial intelligence, it’d be strange if most of y’all hadn’t heard of NVIDIA by now.

But what about SLB?

Here’s some long-story-short context — SLB creates and deploys the necessary technology and systems for a.) reducing use case-specific emissions while b.) meeting far-and-wide energy demands on the path towards, quote, “true net zero and beyond.”

“With a global footprint in more than 100 countries and employees representing almost twice as many nationalities,” one SLB representative proudly wrote, “we work each day on innovating oil and gas, delivering digital at scale, decarbonizing industries, and developing and scaling new energy systems that accelerate the next great energy transition.”

Needless to say, the energy sector is smack-dab in the center of SLB’s M.O.

This is why SLB and NVIDIA are building on their long-standing collaboration to develop additional GenAI-powered solutions for this very sector.

“And how will GenAI continue to fundamentally transform the way energy works over the next five to 10 years?” per a question SLB posed.

“Not alone,” they affirmed.

That’s for sure.

In fact (in this vein of working better together, rather than separately), SLB and NVIDIA have been collaborators since all the way back to 2008. And according to Shanker Trivedi, SVP of Enterprise Business at NVIDIA, the two organizations have been cooking up a variety of projects that will drive continued innovation.

“SLB was one of our earliest industrial customers to utilize NVIDIA GPUs at enterprise scale. Specifically, NVIDIA GPUs provided the computing power needed to process massive amounts of data to create accurate subsurface images of complex geological environments,” Trivedi explained. “Over the years, our companies have worked closely together to optimize SLB’s HPC technologies on every generation of NVIDIA GPUs.”

“In addition to working together on developing immersive data visualization solutions to create physically accurate digital twins of real-world energy operations,” Trivedi added, “SLB is also leveraging the NVIDIA NeMo platform to develop and train GenAI models.” (NeMo, for any unaware, provides a comprehensive platform for creating custom AI models, including LLMs, multimodal models, vision AI and speech AI.)

“And now,” Trivedi closed, “SLB will utilize NVIDIA NIM inference microservices to simplify the deployment and management of these generative AI models, ensuring that they can be easily integrated into various applications widely used in the energy industry.”

Furthermore, this SLB-NVIDIA collab will reportedly lead to SLB building and optimizing models to the specific requirements of other data-intensive energy industry needs, including subsurface exploration, production operations and data management. This will help, quote, “unlock the full potential of generative AI for energy domain experts including researchers, scientists and engineers?enabling them to interact with complex technical processes in new ways to drive higher value and lower carbon outcomes.”

"As we navigate the delicate balance between energy production and decarbonization, generative AI is emerging as a crucial catalyst for change," said Olivier Le Peuch, CEO of SLB. "Our collaboration with NVIDIA will accelerate the creation of tailored generative AI solutions, enabling our customers to optimize operations, enhance efficiency and minimize their overall footprint."

Shashi Menon, VP of Digital Technology at SLB, wrapped up by saying “SLB also plans to make our GenAI foundation models available as NIM inference microservices on NVIDIA-powered infrastructure, making it easier for our companies’ customers in the energy sector to benefit from these powerful AI tools.”

For more insights from SLB and NVIDIA, check out this conversation between SLB’s Menon and NVIDIA’s Trivedi here.