Meet SLB: The $70 billion oil services giant poised to cash in on AI data centers and the post-Strait of Hormuz oil exploration boom

In 1912, the French physicist Conrad Schlumberger could be found kneeling on the ground of his family’s estate in Normandy, strategically placing wired electrodes in the soil. He was performing conductivity tests to detect the buried ruins of a medieval abbey destroyed there during the French Revolution. But the experiment had a broader purpose: proving that electric instruments could be used to reveal and map underground structures from the surface. Schlumberger’s approach worked, and it turned out to be a remarkably effective tool for a more lucrative enterprise: finding oil.

Conrad and his brother Marcel Schlumberger went on to create the first well logs—using electric cables for subsurface readings, producing outputs that resembled EKG heart monitor readings. The method became the backbone of modern geophysical prospecting, and supercharged the growth of a burgeoning oil and gas exploration industry worldwide. In 1926 the brothers founded the Société de Prospection Électrique (Electric Prospecting Co.). That company—eventually Schlumberger and now SLB—rapidly expanded into Venezuela, the United States, and the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1930s, Schlumberger had moved into the Middle East, more than 20 years before the formation of OPEC.

Over a century of upheaval and industrial reinvention, SLB has grown into the largest oilfield services and energy technology company in the world. Known in the industry as “Big Blue” for its signature blue uniforms, it has remained in all those key locations, and expanded to another 100 countries.

Now, as the Middle East’s oil and gas sector rebounds from the biggest energy supply shock in modern history—the monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz—and Venezuela rebuilds its energy infrastructure, SLB is ideally positioned to profit from this growth in its next century.

In the energy services industry, which does all the grunt work for oil producers—drilling, fracking, and, increasingly, digital and AI-driven automation services—SLB is larger than its better-known American rivals, Halliburton and Baker Hughes. With 109,000 workers worldwide, SLB employs more people than ExxonMobil and Chevron combined.

In Venezuela, SLB and Chevron—two companies that never left the country even after the Hugo Chávez regime expropriated oil assets—will work with state-owned PDVSA to reinvigorate the world’s largest proven oil reserves. In the Middle East, SLB partners with Saudi Aramco, the United Arab Emirates’ ADNOC, Kuwait Petroleum, and others.

“The thing about SLB is they don’t leave,” said James West, head of energy and power at Melius Research. “They don’t leave countries when there’s a coup or a change in government or a conflict.

“Every international market is their backyard,” West added. “So I think they’re going to be the biggest beneficiary of this recovery in oil and natural gas production.”

Thriving even amid chaos and conflict

Olivier Le Peuch knows to never let an energy crisis go to waste. He is the first French CEO of SLB since 1986, a year before he joined the company as a young electrical engineer. Sitting in its Houston office—SLB is formally incorporated in Curaçao for tax purposes, but its three principal offices are in Houston, Paris, and The Hague—Le Peuch, 62, exuded calm. SLB, after all, thrives in chaos and conflict.

“We are very used to this,” Le Peuch explained in thickly accented English. “It’s part of who we are. It’s part of the routine, unfortunately, that we have learned to live with crisis management, and working in situations that are geopolitically complex.”

“Geopolitically complex” may be an understatement. The world entered 2026 on the verge of a global oil glut, before the Middle East conflict quickly changed everything, choking off nearly 20% of the world’s oil and gas supply and dramatically shrinking emergency oil reserves around the world from the U.S. to China. With........

© Fortune