Verified
Saudi Aramco
Scaling- Energy
- 76,664 staff
- $2.6B AI-driven value (2025)
- METABRAIN, built in-house
- ~500 AI use cases
- 49% of HUMAIN
Saudi Aramco deploys AI mainly through models it builds and runs in its own Dhahran data centers, led by aramcoMETABRAIN, an industrial language model trained on decades of company data, alongside DeepSeek and OpenAI models. Saudi Aramco reported $2.6 billion of third-party verified Technology Realized Value from AI-driven solutions in 2025, about half of its $5.3 billion total, across roughly 500 use cases. In Nov 2026 Saudi Aramco took a 49% stake in HUMAIN, the national AI company, for about $2.6 billion in cash plus AI assets.
aramco.comTheir approach to AI
- The platform
- aramcoMETABRAIN is the industrial large language model Saudi Aramco built and trained on decades of company data, launched in Mar 2024; Saudi Aramco said in Nov 2025 that it answers about 40,000 prompts a day.
- The models
- Saudi Aramco serves its own METABRAIN models, a 70 billion parameter version in Feb 2025 with a trillion-parameter version in development, and also deploys DeepSeek and OpenAI models, its digital chief said in Sep 2026.
- The reach
- Saudi Aramco says tens of thousands of its 76,664 employees use its in-house language models, which handle millions of requests a day (Aug 2026), and more than 6,000 staff are trained to find AI use cases (Jan 2026).
- The catch
- Saudi Aramco's $2.6 billion AI figure is an internal metric of gains over a business baseline, verified by an unnamed third party; Saudi Aramco publishes no return per use case, no AI spend and no weekly user count.
Snapshot
- Employees
- 76,664
- Saudi Arabian Oil Company, end of 2025, up from 75,118 in 2024 (2025 Annual Report)
- Research and development
- $1.45B (2025)
- R&D expense, down from $1.55B in 2024; no technology or AI budget is published
- AI talent
- 6,000+ trained in AI
- Subject-matter experts, not data analysts (Jan 2026); no AI/ML headcount is published
- Who owns AI
- Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, EVP Technology & Innovation
- Since Apr 2023; chairs Aramco Digital; SVP Digital & IT Sami Al-Ajmi runs digital and IT
- Platform
- aramcoMETABRAIN, built in-house
- Industrial language model launched Mar 2024; Plant METABRAIN time-series model announced Feb 2025
- Models
- METABRAIN, DeepSeek, OpenAI
- Partner agnostic, SVP Sami Al-Ajmi told Semafor in Sep 2026
- Reach
- Tens of thousands of employees
- Users of in-house language models (Aug 2026); about 40,000 METABRAIN prompts a day in Nov 2025
- Use cases
- ~500
- Jan 2026; 100 moved from pilot to deployment in the prior year
Key findings
Saudi Aramco's 2025 Annual Report, published Mar 10, 2026, credits AI-driven solutions with $2.6 billion of the $5.3 billion in third-party verified Technology Realized Value it booked in 2025, a measure of capital or operating cost avoided and revenue added over a business baseline.
Saudi Aramco's Technology Realized Value rose from about $2 billion in 2023 to $4 billion in 2024 and $5.3 billion in 2025, for $11.3 billion since 2023, against $200 million to $300 million a year before 2023, Amin Nasser said in Jan 2026.
Saudi Aramco built its own industrial large language model, aramcoMETABRAIN, launched in Mar 2024, and Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said on Aug 31, 2026 that the company's in-house models are used by tens of thousands of employees and handle millions of requests a day.
Saudi Aramco closed the purchase of a 49% stake in HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund's AI company, on Nov 1, 2026, paying about $2.6 billion in cash and transferring AI, compute and digital assets, reported to include parts of its Aramco Digital subsidiary.
Saudi Aramco raised its dense half-precision AI computing capacity 10-fold in 2025 to more than 570 PetaFLOPs, runs it in its own data centers in Dhahran, and plans an upstream supercomputer with 7 times today's upstream capacity by early 2027.
Where Aramco sits
- Stage
- Scaling
Saudi Aramco sits at Scaling because it reports a firm-level return it credits to AI: its 2025 Annual Report, published Mar 10, 2026, says $2.6 billion of its $5.3 billion third-party verified Technology Realized Value in 2025 came from AI-driven solutions, measured as capital or operating cost avoided or revenue added over a business baseline. Saudi Aramco has published no return for a single named use case that meets the ROI rule. On rollout, Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, the Executive Vice President of Technology & Innovation who reports the program's value in public, said on Aug 31, 2026 that tens of thousands of employees use the company's in-house language models, led by aramcoMETABRAIN. Saudi Aramco falls short of Embedded because it has not said how many of its 76,664 employees use AI each week or which workflows it has redesigned around AI company-wide.
How the stages are defined - Ownership
- EVP Technology & Innovation Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, on the Executive Management team
- Platform
- Hybrid: METABRAIN built in-house; DeepSeek, OpenAI and partner platforms alongside
- Models
- In-house METABRAIN models, plus DeepSeek and OpenAI models
- Hosting
- Own Dhahran data centers (Dammam-7, Nvidia SuperPODs); Groq inference center in Dammam via Aramco Digital; Microsoft Azure under study
- Reach
- Tens of thousands of employees on in-house models (Aug 2026)
How they deploy
Build on proprietary data
Saudi Aramco's AI and digital strategy rests on 3 pillars, infrastructure, data and talent, according to its 2025 Annual Report. Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said in Feb 2025 that Saudi Aramco has more than 90 years of proprietary geological, seismic and process data and collects about 10 billion data points a day, and that it develops its own models on its own data instead of relying only on global technology companies. Amin Nasser told Davos in Jan 2026 that data quality, not buying chips, is what produces value.
Measure value, not activity
Saudi Aramco tracks technology returns with Technology Realized Value, a metric verified by a third party that counts the incremental financial benefit of deployed Aramco technologies through avoided capital or operating spending or added revenue, measured against the business baseline. Saudi Aramco reports the AI share of that value separately, about half in 2024 and 2025.
Subject-matter experts find the use cases
Saudi Aramco trains engineers, scientists and operators to spot AI opportunities instead of leaving that to data analysts; Amin Nasser said in Jan 2026 that more than 6,000 such experts have been trained. Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said in Nov 2025 that Saudi Aramco trains all employees, from executives to frontline workers, to use AI-based solutions, and works with Caltech, Imperial College and KAUST on advanced degrees.
Partner agnostic on models
Sami Al-Ajmi, Saudi Aramco's Senior Vice President of Digital & Information Technology, told Semafor in Sep 2026 that the company is partner agnostic, deploying models from DeepSeek and OpenAI while developing its own. Saudi Aramco signs framework agreements with several technology companies at once, including Nvidia, AWS and Qualcomm in May 2025, Microsoft in Feb 2026 and IBM in May 2026.
AI assets move into HUMAIN
Saudi Aramco folded part of its AI business into HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund's full-stack AI company, taking a 49% stake that closed on Nov 1, 2026. Saudi Aramco says it expects to use HUMAIN's AI infrastructure to turn AI capabilities into industrial applications and to earn revenue from its existing AI and digital assets as a shareholder.
Agents with guardrails
Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said at LEAP on Aug 31, 2026 that Saudi Aramco's AI models now take actions instead of only giving advice, that autonomous systems need strong guardrails, and that the aim is to do more with the existing workforce, not to cut it.
- Deployment model
- Saudi Aramco runs AI from the center and delivers it in the operating businesses. The Technology & Innovation organization under EVP Ahmad Al-Khowaiter sets technology strategy and reports Technology Realized Value; the Digital & Information Technology organization under SVP Sami Al-Ajmi runs computing, connectivity, cybersecurity and enterprise digital work; and Aramco Digital, a subsidiary chaired by Al-Khowaiter, builds industrial digital and AI services such as a 450 MHz private 5G network and edge AI. Use cases come from subject-matter experts inside Upstream, Downstream and Technical Services, and Amin Nasser said in Jan 2026 that 100 use cases moved from pilot to deployment in the prior year.
- Model providers
- Saudi Aramco launched aramcoMETABRAIN in Mar 2024 as a 250 billion parameter model trained on 7 trillion tokens of public and Aramco data; Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said in Feb 2025 that a 70 billion parameter version was serving the business and a trillion-parameter version was in development, and introduced Plant METABRAIN, a time-series transformer for real-time process data. Sami Al-Ajmi told Semafor in Sep 2026 that Saudi Aramco also deploys models from DeepSeek and OpenAI. DeepSeek began running through Aramco Digital's data centers in Dammam in Feb 2025, according to bne IntelliNews.
- Data and infrastructure
- Saudi Aramco runs its models on its own computing in Dhahran: the Dammam-7 supercomputer built in 2021, an AI supercomputer launched in 2024 and several Nvidia SuperPODs, with dense half-precision AI capacity above 570 PetaFLOPs at the end of 2025 and 1,500 petabytes of storage reported in Feb 2025. Aramco Digital and Groq built an AI inference data center in Dammam with about 19,000 Groq chips, and the Pasqal quantum computer and its cloud service sit in Saudi Aramco's Dhahran data center. Under a Feb 2026 memorandum Saudi Aramco is exploring AI solutions on Microsoft Azure with sovereign controls to meet national data residency rules. Saudi Aramco has not said which compute assets it transferred to HUMAIN in Nov 2026.
Platforms and internal tools
aramcoMETABRAINMar 2024
aramcoMETABRAIN is Saudi Aramco's industrial large language model, trained on decades of company data and used for drilling plans, geological data and documentation; Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said in Nov 2025 that it serves about 40,000 prompts a day, and on Aug 31, 2026 that Saudi Aramco's in-house models are used by tens of thousands of employees and process millions of requests a day.
- Users
- Tens of thousands of employees (Aug 2026)
- Models
- In-house: 250B parameters at launch, 70B serving in Feb 2025, 1T in development
Plant METABRAINAnnounced Feb 2025
Plant METABRAIN is a time-series transformer model trained on Saudi Aramco's process data to give operators and engineers real-time insight, anticipate demand, predict product quality and optimize production, introduced by Ahmad Al-Khowaiter at LEAP in Feb 2025.
AI computing estate
Saudi Aramco's AI computing includes the Dammam-7 supercomputer (2021), an AI supercomputer launched in 2024 and Nvidia SuperPODs, together above 570 PetaFLOPs of dense half-precision capacity after a 10-fold rise in 2025; Saudi Aramco plans a new upstream supercomputer with 7 times today's upstream capacity by early 2027.
Groq inference center (Aramco Digital)Dec 2024
Aramco Digital and Groq built an AI inference data center in Dammam with about 19,000 Groq chips, through which DeepSeek began operating in Feb 2025. Middle East AI News listed the center among the assets expected to move to HUMAIN; Saudi Aramco has not confirmed the list.
CyberMind
CyberMind is Saudi Aramco's AI security system, which Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said on Aug 31, 2026 automates millions of investigations and processes more than a billion potential threats a year.
Vendors and partners
HUMAINOct 2025 term sheet; closed Nov 2026
National AI company, 49% owned by Saudi Aramco since Nov 1, 2026 · Saudi Aramco paid about $2.6 billion in cash and transferred AI, compute and digital assets; the Public Investment Fund keeps 51%, and Amin Nasser sits on the HUMAIN board.
Groq2024
Inference chips for Aramco Digital's Dammam data center · A $1.5 billion expansion of the Dammam inference center was announced at LEAP in Feb 2025, according to Middle East AI News.
NvidiaMay 2025 MoU
GPUs in Saudi Aramco's AI supercomputer and SuperPODs; industrial AI MoU · Saudi Aramco's May 2025 memorandum with Nvidia covers industrial AI computing infrastructure, an AI hub, AI Enterprise platforms and an engineering and robotics center of excellence.
MicrosoftFeb 12, 2026 MoU
Azure-based industrial AI and sovereign cloud roadmap · Saudi Aramco's non-binding memorandum with Microsoft also covers an industrial AI marketplace and skills programs in AI engineering, cybersecurity and data governance.
DeepSeek and OpenAI
Outside models deployed alongside METABRAIN · Sami Al-Ajmi named DeepSeek and OpenAI as Saudi Aramco model providers in Sep 2026 (Semafor).
IBMMay 5, 2026
Collaboration on industrial and agentic AI, automation and materials science
Amazon Web ServicesMay 2025
Non-binding strategic framework on digital transformation and lower-carbon work
QualcommBy 2025
Edge AI on Aramco Digital's 450 MHz 5G industrial network; DISAI startup accelerator
CrowdStrikeFeb 2026 MoU
Proposed partnership on AI-powered cybersecurity for operational technology
PasqalInstalled Nov 2025
Quantum computer at the Dhahran data center; Aramco venture portfolio company
Leadership
AI, data and platform leaders
Executives
Board
AI org map
Central technology and digital organizations with use cases built by subject-matter experts in each business; a 49% stake in HUMAIN for national AI infrastructure
Saudi Aramco places technology strategy with EVP Technology & Innovation Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, a member of Executive Management under President and CEO Amin H. Nasser, and digital and IT operations with SVP Sami A. Al-Ajmi. Aramco Digital, a subsidiary chaired by Al-Khowaiter and led since May 2026 by Ashraf AlTahini, builds industrial digital services, and part of it moved into HUMAIN, in which Saudi Aramco took a 49% stake on Nov 1, 2026.
Saudi Aramco's AI work sits in 3 places: the Technology & Innovation organization under Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, which includes research centers such as EXPEC ARC; the Digital & Information Technology organization under Sami Al-Ajmi; and the operating businesses, where more than 6,000 subject-matter experts trained in AI find and build use cases (Jan 2026). Saudi Aramco publishes no count of AI engineers or data scientists; Middle East AI News reported a team of more than 80 AI professionals and data scientists in Mar 2024, and Aramco Digital, a separate subsidiary, moved part of its portfolio and staff to HUMAIN in Nov 2026.
Reporting lines
Board of Directors
Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, Chairman
President and CEO
Amin H. Nasser
Technology & Innovation
Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter, EVP
Technology strategy, research centers and Technology Realized Value reporting
Digital & Information Technology
Sami A. Al-Ajmi, SVP
Computing, connectivity, cybersecurity and enterprise digital work; the reporting line to Technology & Innovation is inferred from joint appearances, not published
Aramco Digital
Ashraf AlTahini, CEO
Subsidiary whose board Al-Khowaiter chairs; shown under Technology & Innovation for that reason
Technical Services
Wail A. Al-Jaafari, EVP
Reliability, corrosion and maintenance AI, including the Hawiyah NGL Plant agents
Upstream
Exploration, drilling and production AI, including geosteering and well-log models
Downstream
Refining network optimization
HUMAIN (49% associate)
Owned 51% by the Public Investment Fund; Amin H. Nasser and Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan sit on its board
Saudi Aramco's 2025 Annual Report lists Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter among Executive Management and as chairman of Aramco Digital, but does not list Sami A. Al-Ajmi or publish his reporting line. Aramco Digital's leadership changed twice in 3 years: founding CEO Tareq Amin left to run HUMAIN, Nabil Al-Nuaim led it from 2025 and Ashraf AlTahini took over in May 2026.
Where the AI workforce sits
Business lines (Upstream, Downstream, Technical Services)
Estimate: Saudi Aramco says its 6,000+ AI-trained subject-matter experts in the businesses originate the use cases, and it publishes no split.
~70-80%Central technology, digital and IT, and Aramco Digital
Estimate: Technology & Innovation, Digital & Information Technology and the Aramco Digital subsidiary build the shared models and computing; no headcount is published.
~20-30%
Named people
Use cases
Saudi Aramco says it has about 500 AI use cases across exploration, drilling, production, refining, maintenance, cybersecurity and office work (Jan 2026), with 100 moved from pilot to deployment in the prior year. Saudi Aramco has published no return for any single named use case that meets the ROI rule: its use-case figures are drilling days, planning time, projected maintenance savings and estimated hours saved. At firm level, Saudi Aramco's 2025 Annual Report credits AI-driven solutions with $2.6 billion of the $5.3 billion in third-party verified Technology Realized Value it recorded in 2025.
| Use case | Area | Status | ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aramco Intelligent Live Earth Model Saudi Aramco uses the Intelligent Live Earth Model to optimize well placement in geosteering, which the 2025 Annual Report says raised reservoir contact by about 10% and cut average drilling time by 2 days per well. | Upstream | In production | |
| PE.AI petrophysical prediction PE.AI is an AI platform that generates synthetic well logs, which Saudi Aramco says reduces the need for traditional well logging and for drilling extra pilot holes. | Upstream | In production | |
| Reservoir and well productivity models Saudi Aramco applies AI models to map reservoirs and choose wells; Amin Nasser said in Jan 2026 that AI raised the productivity of some wells by 30% to 40% and reduced the number of wells needed per barrel, without giving a dollar figure. | Upstream | In production | |
| Global linear programming model Saudi Aramco's 2025 Annual Report lists a global linear programming model among its AI solutions; it connects all in-Kingdom downstream facilities to optimize supply cost and maximize gross refining margins. | Downstream | In production | |
| Global Optimizer market recommendations Global Optimizer analyzes Saudi Aramco's refining and petrochemical assets together with news, economic data and demand signals to recommend which markets to prioritize, Sami Al-Ajmi told Semafor in Sep 2026. | Downstream | In production | |
| Hawiyah NGL Plant Reliability Agent Saudi Aramco's multi-agent AI predicts problems and prescribes fixes; Wail Al-Jaafari said in Nov 2025 that the Hawiyah NGL Plant Reliability Agent cut maintenance planning time by 40% and is projected to reduce annual maintenance costs by 15% to 20%. The Hawiyah NGL Plant joined the World Economic Forum's Global Lighthouse Network in 2026, cited for digital twin optimization and AI-enabled asset management. | Technical Services | In production | |
| AI corrosion prediction Saudi Aramco's AI models anticipate corrosion from more than 10 million sensor readings a year across over 40 facilities, 63,000 pieces of static equipment and 20,000 pipeline segments. Wail Al-Jaafari said corrosion management technologies, of which AI is one, saved or avoided more than $770 million on about $70 million invested over 3 years (Nov 2025). | Technical Services | In production | |
| AI agents for field operators Saudi Aramco is developing AI agents to help field operators with inspections and diagnostics, Wail Al-Jaafari said in Nov 2025. | Technical Services | Pilot | |
| Robotic and drone inspections Robots and drones replace manual inspections in many Saudi Aramco facilities, and AI systems predict equipment failures before they occur, Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said in Nov 2025. | Operations | In production | |
| Plant METABRAIN process modeling Plant METABRAIN models Saudi Aramco's real-time plant processes to anticipate demand, optimize operations and predict product quality; Saudi Aramco has not said how widely it is deployed. | Operations | Announced | |
| Methane analytics and drilling prediction Saudi Aramco uses AI analytics to manage and reduce methane emissions and drilling prediction models that guide operating windows, improve well integrity and cut rig fuel use (Nov 2025 and the 2025 Sustainability Report). | Sustainability | In production | |
| In-house language models for employees Saudi Aramco employees use aramcoMETABRAIN and other in-house language models for documentation and daily work; Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said on Aug 31, 2026 that tens of thousands of employees use them and that Saudi Aramco estimates they save hundreds of thousands of working hours a year, with no cost figure given. | Firmwide | In production | |
| AI-enabled IT service monitoring Saudi Aramco uses AI monitoring to cut the time needed to resolve IT service issues, which Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said generates many millions of hours of productivity savings (Aug 2026). | Digital & IT | In production | |
| CyberMind threat investigation CyberMind automates millions of security investigations and processes more than a billion potential threats a year at Saudi Aramco (Aug 2026), and a Feb 2026 memorandum with CrowdStrike proposes AI-powered security for operational technology. | Cybersecurity | In production |
Adoption
Saudi Aramco spread AI in 3 layers: machine learning and analytics in upstream and plant operations, supported by the Dammam-7 supercomputer from 2021; its own industrial language model, aramcoMETABRAIN, from Mar 2024; and agents that act on their own in reliability and IT work from 2025. aramcoMETABRAIN served about 40,000 prompts a day in Nov 2025, and Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said on Aug 31, 2026 that tens of thousands of employees use Saudi Aramco's in-house models, which process millions of requests a day; the two figures measure different things and Saudi Aramco has given no weekly or monthly user count. Saudi Aramco's use cases rose from about 400 to about 500 between Jan 2025 and Jan 2026, and its 2025 Sustainability Report says almost 500 are deployed company-wide, while the 2025 Annual Report says about 500 have been identified.
By the numbers
Rollout, first pilot to today
2021
Saudi Aramco built the Dammam-7 supercomputer, which Sami Al-Ajmi later called one of the engines of its digital work, and set up Cyberani for industrial cybersecurity.
2023
Saudi Aramco formed Aramco Digital to lead digital transformation and AI development, with Tareq Amin as its first CEO.
Mar 2024
Saudi Aramco launched aramcoMETABRAIN, a 250 billion parameter industrial language model trained on 7 trillion tokens of public and company data, at LEAP.
Feb 2025
Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said a 70 billion parameter METABRAIN was serving the business, a trillion-parameter version was in development and more than 6,000 AI developers were in training, and introduced Plant METABRAIN; DeepSeek began running through Aramco Digital's Dammam data centers.
May 2025
Saudi Aramco signed agreements with Nvidia on industrial AI computing and an AI hub, with AWS on digital transformation and, through Aramco Digital, with Qualcomm on edge AI, among 34 deals with US companies.
Nov 2025
Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said aramcoMETABRAIN serves about 40,000 prompts a day, and Wail Al-Jaafari described multi-agent reliability AI at the Hawiyah NGL Plant.
Jan 2026
Amin Nasser said Saudi Aramco had about 500 AI use cases, 100 of them moved from pilot to deployment in the prior year, and more than 6,000 subject-matter experts trained in AI.
Mar 2026
Saudi Aramco reported $2.6 billion of Technology Realized Value from AI-driven solutions in 2025 and a 10-fold rise in AI computing capacity to more than 570 PetaFLOPs.
Aug 2026
Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said tens of thousands of Saudi Aramco employees use its in-house language models and that its AI models now take actions, not only give advice.
Nov 2026
Saudi Aramco closed its purchase of 49% of HUMAIN, contributing about $2.6 billion in cash plus AI, compute and digital assets.
Economics & controls
Spend and ROI
Reported ROI
Saudi Aramco's 2025 Annual Report, published Mar 10, 2026, reports Technology Realized Value of SAR 19.9 billion ($5.3 billion) in 2025, of which SAR 9.8 billion ($2.6 billion) came from AI-driven solutions and SAR 10.1 billion ($2.7 billion) from other technologies. Saudi Aramco defines Technology Realized Value as the incremental financial benefit of deployed Aramco technologies through avoided capital or operating spending or added revenue, measured against the business baseline, undiscounted and tax-free, and has it verified by a third party it does not name. Technology Realized Value was about $2 billion in 2023 and $4 billion in 2024, roughly half from AI in 2024, for $11.3 billion since 2023.
How the AI share has been described
Saudi Aramco's statements on the AI share of 2024 value differ: Aramco Europe gave $1.8 billion of AI-driven Technology Realized Value for 2024, Wail Al-Jaafari said $2 billion in Nov 2025, and Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said around half of $4 billion. Amin Nasser said at Davos in Jan 2026 that more than 50% of the 2023 and 2024 total was AI related, and Aramco Europe wrote in Jan 2026 that AI investments had achieved more than $6 billion in realized business value, which matches the total for all technology in those 2 years.
Technology and AI investment
Saudi Aramco spent SAR 5.4 billion ($1.45 billion) on research and development in 2025, down from $1.55 billion in 2024, and publishes no separate technology or AI budget. Saudi Aramco raised its AI computing capacity 10-fold in 2025, plans an upstream supercomputer for early 2027, and runs Aramco Ventures with about $7.5 billion of capital and around 300 portfolio companies, most in digital and AI (Aug 2026). Forbes Middle East reported that Aramco Digital was launched in 2023 with a planned $1.9 billion investment over 3 years.
HUMAIN
Saudi Aramco contributed about SAR 9.9 billion ($2.6 billion) in cash in 2026 plus AI assets for a 49% stake in HUMAIN, accounted for as an associate, through its subsidiary Saudi Aramco Development Company. Saudi Aramco says the stake is expected to bring revenue growth and attractive margins and to monetize its existing AI and digital assets, and has not published a value for the assets it transferred.
Productivity and headcount
Saudi Aramco's employee count rose to 76,664 at the end of 2025 from 75,118 a year earlier. Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said on Aug 31, 2026 that AI is about doing more with the existing workforce, not reducing it, and that in-house language models save an estimated hundreds of thousands of working hours a year; Saudi Aramco gives no cost or headcount equivalent. Saudi Aramco's Downstream transformation program delivered about $1.2 billion of incremental EBIT in 2025 through asset performance, yield, integration and cost measures, with no AI share stated.
Governance and risk
Verified value metric
Saudi Aramco's Technology Realized Value is verified by a third party and counts only benefits from deployed Aramco technologies against a business baseline, according to the 2025 Annual Report. Saudi Aramco does not publish the verifier's name or the per-use-case figures behind the total.
Security built into AI
Sami Al-Ajmi said in Jun 2025 that Saudi Aramco's Eye on AI program builds cybersecurity into AI models from initial design to deployment. Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said on Aug 31, 2026 that cybersecurity, digital ethics and governance must be part of how Saudi Aramco develops, deploys and scales AI, and that autonomous agents need strong guardrails.
Data sovereignty
Saudi Aramco trains and runs its METABRAIN models on its own computing in Dhahran. Under the Feb 12, 2026 memorandum with Microsoft, Saudi Aramco is exploring a roadmap for cloud deployments with sovereign controls that meet Saudi Arabia's national data residency requirements.
Disclosed risks
Saudi Aramco's 2025 Annual Report lists technological initiatives including AI, where it has limited or no prior operating experience, among project risks, and warns that AI-powered cyberattacks such as deepfakes raise the risk of breaches of IT and industrial control systems that it describes as a high-profile target for nation states.
Cyber defense
Saudi Aramco's CyberMind system processes more than a billion potential threats a year (Aug 2026), and Saudi Aramco signed a memorandum with CrowdStrike in Feb 2026 on AI-powered threat detection for the operational technology of energy and chemical plants. Amin Nasser warned in Jun 2025 that a technical malfunction or outside interference through digital control systems could disrupt industrial facilities.
Recent signals
Nov 3, 2026
Saudi Aramco's third quarter 2026 results reported the HUMAIN stake and a planned mining joint venture with Maaden that will draw on Saudi Aramco's subsurface data, AI and high-performance computing.
Nov 1, 2026
Saudi Aramco and the Public Investment Fund closed Saudi Aramco's purchase of 49% of HUMAIN for about $2.6 billion in cash plus AI, compute and digital assets, and Amin Nasser said a significant portion of the $11.3 billion of value since 2023 came from AI.
Sep 17, 2026
Sami Al-Ajmi told Semafor that Saudi Aramco's technology delivered more than $5 billion of realized value in 2025 and that the company is partner agnostic, deploying DeepSeek and OpenAI models alongside its own.
Aug 31, 2026
Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said at LEAP that tens of thousands of Saudi Aramco employees use its in-house language models, which process millions of requests a day, and that its AI models now take actions.
Aug 4, 2026
Saudi Aramco's half-year report said the Hawiyah NGL Plant joined the World Economic Forum's Global Lighthouse Network, its sixth facility to do so, for digital twin optimization and AI-enabled asset management.
Jul 2026
The European Commission cleared Saudi Aramco Development Company and the Public Investment Fund to take joint control of HUMAIN under the EU Merger Regulation.
May 18, 2026
Aramco Digital named Ashraf AlTahini chief executive, succeeding Nabil Al-Nuaim, with a focus on industrial AI.
May 5, 2026
Saudi Aramco and IBM announced a collaboration on industrial and agentic AI, automation and materials science at IBM Think in Boston.
May 2026
Saudi Aramco's 2025 Sustainability Report said it has deployed almost 500 AI use cases company-wide and that around half of 2025 Technology Realized Value was linked to AI.
Mar 10, 2026
Saudi Aramco reported $5.3 billion of Technology Realized Value for 2025, $2.6 billion of it from AI-driven solutions.
Feb 12, 2026
Saudi Aramco signed a non-binding memorandum with Microsoft to explore industrial AI on Azure, a sovereign cloud roadmap and AI skills programs.
Feb 2026
Saudi Aramco signed a memorandum with CrowdStrike on AI-powered cybersecurity and announced a next-generation upstream supercomputer due in early 2027.
Jan 20, 2026
Amin Nasser told Davos that Saudi Aramco's AI use cases had reached about 500 and that technology would deliver $3 billion to $5 billion of realized value in 2025, with AI more than half.
Nov 25, 2025
Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said in Paris that Saudi Aramco trains all employees to use AI-based solutions and that its multi-agent AI cuts maintenance planning from days to hours.
Quick answers
- How does Saudi Aramco deploy AI?
- Saudi Aramco deploys AI mainly through models it builds and runs in its own Dhahran data centers, led by aramcoMETABRAIN, an industrial language model trained on decades of company data, alongside DeepSeek and OpenAI models. Saudi Aramco reported $2.6 billion of third-party verified Technology Realized Value from AI-driven solutions in 2025, about half of its $5.3 billion total, across roughly 500 use cases. In Nov 2026 Saudi Aramco took a 49% stake in HUMAIN, the national AI company, for about $2.6 billion in cash plus AI assets.
- What does Saudi Aramco use AI for?
- Saudi Aramco says it has about 500 AI use cases across exploration, drilling, production, refining, maintenance, cybersecurity and office work (Jan 2026), with 100 moved from pilot to deployment in the prior year. Saudi Aramco has published no return for any single named use case that meets the ROI rule: its use-case figures are drilling days, planning time, projected maintenance savings and estimated hours saved. At firm level, Saudi Aramco's 2025 Annual Report credits AI-driven solutions with $2.6 billion of the $5.3 billion in third-party verified Technology Realized Value it recorded in 2025.
- Who leads AI at Saudi Aramco?
- AI at Saudi Aramco is led by Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter (Executive Vice President, Technology & Innovation); Sami A. Al-Ajmi (Senior Vice President, Digital & Information Technology); Ashraf AlTahini (Chief Executive Officer, Aramco Digital). Ownership of AI on the org chart: EVP Technology & Innovation Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, on the Executive Management team.
- What AI platform does Saudi Aramco use?
- aramcoMETABRAIN is the industrial large language model Saudi Aramco built and trained on decades of company data, launched in Mar 2024; Saudi Aramco said in Nov 2025 that it answers about 40,000 prompts a day.
- Which AI models does Saudi Aramco use?
- Saudi Aramco serves its own METABRAIN models, a 70 billion parameter version in Feb 2025 with a trillion-parameter version in development, and also deploys DeepSeek and OpenAI models, its digital chief said in Sep 2026.
- How many Aramco employees use AI?
- Saudi Aramco says tens of thousands of its 76,664 employees use its in-house language models, which handle millions of requests a day (Aug 2026), and more than 6,000 staff are trained to find AI use cases (Jan 2026).
- What return has Saudi Aramco reported from AI?
- Saudi Aramco sits at Scaling because it reports a firm-level return it credits to AI: its 2025 Annual Report, published Mar 10, 2026, says $2.6 billion of its $5.3 billion third-party verified Technology Realized Value in 2025 came from AI-driven solutions, measured as capital or operating cost avoided or revenue added over a business baseline. Saudi Aramco has published no return for a single named use case that meets the ROI rule. On rollout, Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, the Executive Vice President of Technology & Innovation who reports the program's value in public, said on Aug 31, 2026 that tens of thousands of employees use the company's in-house language models, led by aramcoMETABRAIN. Saudi Aramco falls short of Embedded because it has not said how many of its 76,664 employees use AI each week or which workflows it has redesigned around AI company-wide.
Open questions
- Which use cases make up Saudi Aramco's $2.6 billion of AI-driven Technology Realized Value in 2025, how much is avoided capital spending versus operating cost or revenue, and who is the third-party verifier?
- How many Saudi Aramco employees use aramcoMETABRAIN and the other in-house models each week, given that the latest statement (Aug 2026) says only tens of thousands?
- Which AI assets did Saudi Aramco transfer to HUMAIN in Nov 2026: the Groq inference center, parts of Aramco Digital, METABRAIN or its computing, and how will Saudi Aramco pay for HUMAIN services from now on?
- Has the trillion-parameter METABRAIN that Saudi Aramco said was in development in Feb 2025 gone into service, and what share of requests go to METABRAIN versus DeepSeek and OpenAI models?
- What does Saudi Aramco spend on AI itself, in computing, models and staff, against the $2.6 billion of value it credits to AI?
- What did the Hawiyah NGL Plant Reliability Agent save in maintenance cost once the projected 15% to 20% reduction could be measured, and what do other deployed tools such as the Intelligent Live Earth Model and CyberMind return in currency?
- Why do Saudi Aramco's figures for AI's share of 2024 value differ ($1.8 billion, $2 billion and around half of $4 billion), and are its roughly 500 use cases identified or deployed?
- Has Saudi Aramco begun running AI workloads on Microsoft Azure under the Feb 2026 memorandum, and where does that leave its own data centers?
Sources
Saudi Aramco
- Remarks by Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter at LEAP 2026 (Aug 31, 2026)
- Remarks by Ahmad O. Khowaiter at the 2025 Adopt AI International Summit (Nov 25, 2025)
- Keynote by Ahmad O. Khowaiter at the Middle East Corrosion Conference 2025 (Nov 2025)
- Opening remarks by Wail A. Al-Jaafari at the Middle East Corrosion Conference 2025 (Nov 2025)
- Aramco signs MoU with Microsoft on industrial AI and digital talent (Feb 12, 2026)
- Aramco announces third quarter 2026 results (Nov 3, 2026)
- Fourth quarter and full-year 2025 results (Mar 10, 2026)
- Amin H. Nasser, President and CEO, biography
- Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter, EVP Technology & Innovation, biography
- The Arabian Sun: Amin Nasser at the World Economic Forum, Davos (Jan 22, 2026)
- The Arabian Sun: Sami Al-Ajmi at LEAP 2026
- Aramco Europe: human capital and quality data to deliver AI value (Jan 27, 2026)
- Aramco Europe: AI and supercomputing drive digital transformation (2025)
Filings and reports
- Saudi Aramco Annual Report 2025 (Mar 10, 2026)
- Annual Report 2025, CEO message
- First quarter 2026 interim report
- Second quarter and half-year 2026 interim report (Aug 4, 2026)
- Third quarter 2026 interim report (Nov 3, 2026)
- 2025 Sustainability Report, CEO statement (May 2026)
- 2025 Sustainability Report, technology and AI as enablers for sustainability (May 2026)
Partners
News
- Semafor: Aramco says technology delivered $5 billion in value last year (Sep 17, 2026)
- Asharq Al-Awsat: Aramco acquires 49% stake in HUMAIN (Nov 2026)
- Middle East AI News: Aramco completes 49% acquisition of HUMAIN (Nov 2026)
- Middle East AI News: Aramco to merge AI assets with HUMAIN (Oct 2025)
- Middle East AI News: Aramco, IBM team up to advance industrial AI (May 2026)
- Middle East AI News: Aramco launches largest industrial LLM (Mar 2024)
- Middle East AI News: Aramco training over 6,000 AI developers (Feb 2025)
- Oil Review Middle East: How Aramco is driving AI on an industrial scale (Feb 2025)
- Bloomberg Línea: Aramco CEO on AI gains at Davos (Jan 20, 2026)
- Argaam: Nasser says technology realized value to range between $3 billion and $5 billion in 2025 (Jan 2026)
- Asharq Al-Awsat: Nasser from Davos, AI has generated $6 billion for Aramco (Jan 2026)
- PYMNTS: Aramco charts digital future, Sami Ajmi at Vivatech (Jun 2025)
- Arab News: Aramco CEO on digital transformation and cybersecurity (Jun 2025)
- Inspectioneering: Aramco signs 34 MoUs and agreements with US companies (May 21, 2025)
- bne IntelliNews: DeepSeek opens in the Gulf through Aramco Digital (Feb 2025)
- People Matters: Aramco Digital appoints Dr. Ashraf AlTahini as CEO (May 18, 2026)
- Forbes Middle East: Nabil Al-Nuaim, top tech leaders 2026 (Feb 2026)
Data confidence
- Confirmed
- Stated in a primary or reputable public source.
- Estimated
- Derived or approximated from public reporting.
- Unconfirmed
- Reported, but not yet corroborated.
Saudi Aramco profile · Enterprise AI diffusion report by Imagine · facts checked against their sources on Nov 5, 2026
