Equipped with gas turbines and cooling expertise, oilfield service companies are entering AI data centers.

As demand in the traditional oil and gas drilling market weakens, oilfield service companies are accelerating their entry into the data center sector—leveraging their existing technological advantages to provide power generation, cooling, and energy efficiency management solutions. On Thursday, crude oil prices hovered near lows, with WTI trading around $56 per barrel; the medium-term expectation of oversupply remains the primary downward pressure. So far this year, WTI crude has fallen more than 25% cumulatively, while the number of active U.S. oil and gas rigs has declined 7% year-on-year to 548. (Thursday’s WTI crude price oscillated near $56) Major oilfield service providers—including Baker Hughes, Halliburton, and Schlumberger—supply gas turbines, power generation systems, battery energy storage, and cooling equipment to data centers, and also assume responsibility for system design and maintenance. Investors view this business expansion as a more attractive growth avenue than traditional oilfield markets. Accelerating strategic deployment by leading firms: Baker Hughes is the most aggressive in its data center push. The company sold nearly 1.2 gigawatts of gas turbine power generation equipment to data center customers in the first ten months of 2025, and spent over $13 billion acquiring Chart Industries, a U.S.-based manufacturer of natural gas processing and storage equipment. It also supplied 16 natural gas turbines to Frontier Infrastructure, a power supplier serving data centers. CEO Lorenzo Simonelli stated: "Data centers are growing exponentially, and supporting the AI boom with infrastructure is central to the evolution of the oil and gas industry." Halliburton announced in October its acquisition of a 20% stake in VoltaGrid, a mobile gas generator supplier. The two parties will jointly develop power generation systems for data centers, focusing on the Middle East market. VoltaGrid currently powers Oracle’s and xAI (Elon Musk’s company)’s Memphis, Tennessee data centers. Schlumberger’s data center business generated $331 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2025—a 140% year-on-year surge. This marks the first time the company has separately disclosed performance for this business segment. CEO Olivier Le Peuch told the Financial Times: "I see only upside potential—we stand to benefit from our customers’ diversification into rapidly expanding new market segments." Smaller oilfield service companies are also following suit. ProPetro and Liberty Energy plan to scale up their power supply businesses to exceed 1 gigawatt.

The three major oilfield service giants are transforming into three distinct types of companies.

Schlumberger’s core identity is ‘cognition.’ Since the two pioneering well-log curves drawn in 1906, the company has relentlessly pursued one fundamental question: What is actually happening underground? Today, that capability has evolved into a comprehensive digital twin system—the DELFI platform integrates seismic, logging, reservoir, and production data into a unified cognitive computing framework, enabling algorithms to optimize the entire oilfield lifecycle. Its true competitive moat lies in staggering hard specifications that leave competitors awestruck: imaging logging resolution down to 0.2 millimeters—sharp enough to discern paper-thin formations along the borehole wall; rotary steering systems maintaining centimeter-level trajectory accuracy in wells five kilometers deep; and offshore completion tools engineered to withstand 15,000 psi pressure and temperatures up to 250°C. Even more critically, Schlumberger is transferring this subsurface understanding capability to carbon capture and storage (CCS), underground hydrogen storage, and geothermal development—essentially betting that ‘as long as humanity continues needing to safely place things underground, we won’t become obsolete.’ Halliburton, by contrast, embodies the opposite extreme: ‘execution.’ As the inventor of hydraulic fracturing and a key driver of the shale revolution, it transformed North America’s energy landscape through engineering prowess in high-pressure pumping, proppant delivery, and fracture monitoring—pushing the number of fracturing stages per well from dozens to over one hundred. The company’s cash flow is tightly coupled to oil price cycles: when oil prices rise, Halliburton is the first to reap massive profits; when they fall, it is the first to see orders slashed. This ‘dirty, labor-intensive’ nature defines its conservatism—though it is also investing in digital oilfields and carbon sequestration, its core strategy remains maximizing efficiency in North American shale while replicating its high-pressure pumping and continuous fracturing technologies across Latin America, Norway, and the Middle East. Halliburton’s clarity lies in acknowledging itself as an engineering-driven cash-flow company—one unwilling to shoulder directional risk for distant futures, choosing instead to perfect the craft of drilling wells to the utmost degree.

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