Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, operates a vast infrastructure of more than 280 locations across Saudi Arabia's oil and gas network. The sheer scale of operations — spanning exploration, drilling, production, refining, and distribution — generated enormous volumes of data that traditional analytics approaches could not process in real time. Unplanned downtime at any major facility could cost millions daily, and optimising production efficiency across this sprawling infrastructure required computational approaches beyond conventional methods.
The company accumulated approximately 90 years of proprietary operational data — from seismic surveys and well logs to refinery telemetry — that sat in disconnected systems. Extracting actionable insights from this data required domain-specific AI models that general-purpose solutions could not provide, given the highly specialised nature of oil and gas operations.
Aramco built a comprehensive AI strategy anchored by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Center, which collects over 5 billion data points daily from across the company. The centerpiece is aramcoMETABRAIN, a 250-billion-parameter industrial large language model trained on 7 trillion data tokens of public and internal data spanning 90 years of operations — with a planned expansion to 1 trillion parameters.
The company has identified 442 AI use cases with over 200 solutions already deployed and 100+ in development. Applications range from predicting drilling output and speeds (audits that previously took weeks can now be generated from field notes within a day) to real-time supply chain alerts and logistics tracking for worldwide shipments.
Five Aramco facilities have been recognised by the World Economic Forum as Manufacturing Lighthouses for their large-scale use of 4IR solutions — making Aramco the only international energy company with more than three facilities in the network. Aramco's CEO stated that digital transformation could boost Saudi industrial productivity by up to 25%.
This is an industry case study based on publicly available information. Saudi Aramco is not a Pertama Partners client.
We help enterprises across Southeast Asia design and deliver AI transformation programs. Let’s talk about what’s possible for your team.
