The oil services giant formerly known as Schlumberger is riding the AI infrastructure wave, with its data center solutions segment on track for $1 billion in annual revenue by year-end.
SLB, the company most people still call Schlumberger, is best known for drilling holes in the ground to find oil. Now it’s building the infrastructure that powers ChatGPT. And the numbers suggest this isn’t just a side hustle.
CEO Olivier Le Peuch confirmed that SLB’s Data Center Solutions business will exceed $1 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2026, with a target of $2 billion by 2027. For a company that spent the better part of a century as the world’s largest oilfield services provider, that’s quite the career change.
The numbers tell the story #
SLB’s Data Center Solutions segment posted $141 million in revenue during Q1 2026. That’s a 45% jump compared to the same quarter last year and a 10% increase from the previous quarter.
Zoom out and the trajectory gets more interesting. The segment generated $460 million in full-year 2025 revenue, which itself represented 121% growth from $208 million in 2024. In other words, SLB more than doubled this business in a single year.
The company has delivered over 1.3 GW of modular infrastructure to hyperscalers to date. Here’s the thing about those prefabricated systems: they reduce onsite construction time by up to 40%.
Why an oil company is building data centers #
Rather than building traditional brick-and-mortar data centers, the company manufactures modular, scalable solutions off-site and ships them to hyperscaler locations.
Le Peuch has positioned this segment as one of SLB’s fastest-growing business lines, and the company treats it as a high-growth, high-margin opportunity that’s fundamentally different from its traditional upstream oil and gas operations.
What this means for investors #
For traditional energy investors, SLB’s data center push represents a meaningful diversification away from oil price volatility. The company reported these Q1 2026 results on April 24. The leap from $460 million in 2025 revenue to a projected $1 billion run rate by the end of 2026 implies the company needs to roughly maintain its current quarterly growth pace. The further jump to $2 billion by 2027 requires the company to double again in about 12 months.
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