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.Recommended Video 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.

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