Nvidia’s Next Huge Bet: Drill, Baby, Drill!

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SLB (NYSE:SLB) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) have collaborated for roughly two decades, and their partnership just took center stage on CNBC. SLB CEO Olivier Le Peuch sat down with Jim Cramer on June 18, 2026 to walk through the company’s digital investor day and explain how AI is rewiring the oil patch into something that looks a lot more like a software business.

Cramer’s framing was direct: the way oil majors “are going to make more money is by bringing in the technology of SLB.” That is a meaningful endorsement for a company whose stock has had a rough month even as the AI narrative around it has strengthened.

The 20-Year Nvidia Backbone

Le Peuch clarified the nature of the Nvidia relationship. SLB discovered Nvidia’s GPU horsepower roughly 20 years ago for reservoir simulation and seismic processing, and the two companies have built what he describes as a symbiotic relationship ever since. The new wrinkle is scale. SLB has been selected as a “modular design partner for NVIDIA DSX AI factories,” and the joint “AI Factory for Energy” announced in March 2026 is being industrialized across SLB’s Delfi and Lumi platforms.

The technical moat matters because oil and gas data is messy, proprietary, and physics-heavy. Le Peuch put it plainly on the Q1 call: “It is the right time for the industry to adopt AI at scale. We are unique in our capability; we have deep domain knowledge and a platform that can help scale AI capability.”

A Software Business Hiding Inside an Oilfield Services Company

SLB’s digital business is only about 7% of revenue, yet it carries higher margins than the core and recurring-revenue characteristics typical of enterprise software. Digital revenue hit $640 million in Q1 2026, up 9% year over year, with digital operations growing 87%. Annual recurring revenue crossed $1.02 billion, up 15%. Data center solutions, the modular infrastructure piece tied to the Nvidia partnership, grew 45% year over year and is targeting a $1 billion run rate by year end.

Le Peuch’s anchor message to Cramer: “This digital trend… is here to be a secular trend… This is durable growth. This is adding a new earnings growth engine to the company.” That reframes the stock. Investors used to discount SLB against crude price cycles. The digital layer changes the equation.

Libya: Proof That Drilling Itself Is Becoming AI

The most concrete data point came from a Libyan operation. Using autonomous drilling, SLB steered the well dynamically to stay in the reservoir sweet spot, cutting drilling time roughly in half while accessing significantly higher net reservoir pay than prior wells. Customers are moving from pilots to full enterprise rollouts. SLB also reports automated footage reading up 145% year on year, a tangible adoption metric rarely seen in oilfield services.

The Stock Setup

SLB shares trade at $48.28, down 11.48% over the past month as WTI crude slid 22.3% from its early-June highs to $84.65. Year to date, SLB is up 32.57%, with a forward P/E of 20 and an analyst target of $62.36. The pullback resets the digital thesis at a lower price for investors weighing Le Peuch’s secular argument.

Nvidia reported Q1 FY2027 revenue of $81.61 billion, up 85.2% year over year, with Jensen Huang calling AI factory buildout “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.” Energy is the next frontier of that buildout. The supporting filing is available via the company’s Q1 FY2027 8-K.

What To Watch

If Le Peuch is right that digital is decoupled from crude, the next two quarters should show data center solutions ARR continuing to compound even as oil prices wobble. The Nvidia partnership is the compute backbone making autonomous drilling commercially viable. For Nvidia, SLB validates that AI factories sell into industries far beyond the cloud. For SLB, the relationship is the bridge from cyclical services vendor to durable AI platform. Keep an eye on the stock as that thesis gets tested.

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