Aramco and NVIDIA collaborate to advance hybrid quantum computing in energy innovation
- SAUDI ARABIA BREAKING NEWS
- Oct 14
- 2 min read
Dhahran, October 14, 2025 (Saudi Arabia Breaking News) – Aramco announced progress in its digital transformation journey through collaboration with NVIDIA, marking a new milestone in the development of hybrid quantum-classical computing to enhance exploration and upstream energy operations.
Using its Dammam-7 Supercomputer, accelerated by NVIDIA graphical processing units (GPUs), Aramco demonstrated one of the largest quantum computing emulators in the region, known as Dammam-7Q (DMM7Q). The system was developed under the company’s Upstream Digital Center (UDC) as part of a broader strategy to accelerate technological innovation in energy.
Aramco said the initiative takes inspiration from the legacy of Dammam Well No. 7, the Kingdom’s first commercial oil discovery, and its namesake Dammam-7 Supercomputer, combining historical significance with cutting-edge computation.
Ashraf Al-Tahini, Vice President of UDC, said the center aims to innovate at the frontier of quantum computing through collaboration with NVIDIA, leveraging GPU-accelerated hybrid systems to address complex energy challenges.
In recent experiments, Aramco utilized the quantum Hadamard edge detection algorithm, developed to exploit future quantum processors, to enhance the resolution of subsurface imaging in geoscience applications.
According to Tim Costa, Senior Director of CAE, Quantum, and CUDA-X at NVIDIA, quantum algorithms hold immense potential but depend on coordinated progress between quantum and traditional supercomputing.
Aramco researchers have used the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform to run GPU-accelerated emulations of future quantum hardware, achieving emulations of up to 30 qubits per GPU and scaling further across multiple GPUs in Dammam-7. The result enabled 3D seismic fault detection using full seismic datasets — a first in quantum-based upstream computing.
The company said this collaboration illustrates how quantum-classical hybrid architectures can accelerate breakthroughs across the energy sector, paving the way for next-generation computational systems.
