And I mean this, what a pleasure. I've known Amin for a few years and have been lucky enough to help him tell his story and the story of Aramco and hope to continue to do so. 10 years for you now leading this company. I mean, how different is Aramco today than it was 10 years ago when you took the top job?
Oh, thank you, Sara, and glad to see you again. And definitely, a lot of challenges and the world is changing. And the energy landscape is also changing, but definitely one thing is everybody is looking for more energy. Demand is strong, fundamentals are strong. If I look at it, 10 years ago the demand was about 295 million barrels of oil equivalent. Today it's 340, 45 million barrels of oil equivalent growth between gas, oil, and coal. That's significant growth that we have seen in the last 10 years. So in spite of all the renewable build, it only offset around 15 million barrels of oil equivalent, while we've seen the growth is 80% of the growth is in hydrocarbons and mostly it's coming from developing countries. Everybody's looking for affordable, reliable, secure, sustainable energy. But the priority shift depending on you are in the global north or south. Some in the north looking at sustainability first, affordability and security of supply. In the south, affordability comes at the top priority and then security of supply and sustainability. And you need to manage all of these things while making sure that you supply the energy the world needs because it's important. And for us, we are in all sectors from renewables, hydrogen, and oil, gas, and petrochemicals and continue to grow.
I know you've been sort of trying to balance the future with the needs of the present. So you said demand for oil is strong right now. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Where's the demand coming from? Where's it the strongest?
80% of the growth today is coming from the global south. If I look at the increase in demand this year, it's around 1.1 to 1.3 million barrels this year. Next year we are also looking at different forecasts between 1.1 and 1.4 million barrels of growth next year. A lot of the demand coming, as I said, from the global south. Most of the demand that we are seeing coming from the global south because energy consumption per capita is small. If you look at it in most of the countries in the global south, it's 1 to 2 barrels per capita, while in Europe it's nine barrels per capita and the US is 22 barrels per capita. So there is a lot of growth potential in the global south and this is where we're seeing the demand growth and mostly coming from developing countries as they are building their economy.
So I asked you how different Aramco is now than it was 10 years ago. I'm curious how you think about where it will be in 10 years and where that balance will be of what you do.
We have been saying for some time that we think oil and gas will continue to be a significant part of the energy mix for decades to come. That's not going to change. And I think you see a lot of U-turns, a lot of policy changes now recognizing the importance of hydrocarbons. And a lot of agencies including Wood Mackenzie, S&P, Rystad are revisiting their net zero numbers for 2050. So we strongly believe oil and gas will remain part. That's where our investment is and we are going to continue to grow our gas because oil, we still have healthy maximum sustainable capacity with healthy spare capacity. Gas, we are growing it by more than 60% over the next 5 years by 2030. We are growing our renewables, we are growing our liquids-to-chemicals because huge growth that we see in different markets. So we are still investing in hydrocarbons but what's different this time is also technology and AI and digitalization. We have a huge investment and we are realizing big value as a result of our investment over the years in digitalization and AI.
How much are you investing in AI?
If you look at it, everybody talks about AI, but AI is, you need to have a huge computing infrastructure. And Aramco over the 90 years, we put tens of billions of dollars to build our infrastructure in computing. We have many supercomputers and all our facilities and assets are connected through these systems. So we have built the system over years. But for that to realize value, you need the quality of data. And this is what we have. And you need the talent. And when I talk about talent, it's not the data scientist only. It is the subject matter expert that you train them on AI. And we have 6,000 of these. And now the realized value in technology in '23 is $2 billion, in '24 $4 billion, and in '25 the guidance going forward is $2 to $4 billion every year. Just half of it that will come from AI alone and the rest from digitalization. So technology is a big enabler, it's transformative in nature, and we have invested over the years in building our technology hubs.
Is that investment paying off?
Well, you can see it from the realized value when I mentioned the numbers per year. So for over the last two years, $6 billion realized. This is third-party verified. So we have very established metrics and we have use cases that we treated as a project to realize the value over time. So we see it in efficiency, in productivity of our wells, of our yields from our columns and the plants. A lot of people talk about AI and they think it's all about cutting manpower in certain sectors like finance or translation or legal or whatever. Most of the savings comes from adopting AI and digitalization in the plants, in the assets themselves because this is where you get the highest value. If you drill a well and you capitalize on AI and digitalization, you can increase the productivity two times as much.
So how does it help? Does it help with oil exploration also?
Oh, it has a huge help in oil exploration. For example, seismic. We can go back to 1D seismic and 2D seismic and take them back and reimage them and we have much better images to see did we leave something in the past. Now with AI, we can have much better collection of data and finding more oil and gas. And this is where we are expanding in our exploration program capitalizing on AI. And AI, by the way, has a huge impact on emissions because it helps you to detect leaks, to minimize leaks by improving your corrosion inhibition and all of these things. So it is not efficiency and cost reduction only but also reducing the carbon footprint.
Are you using it more effectively than your competitors or is everyone doing this?
Well, I gave you numbers that are third-party verified. So, you know, everybody talks about AI, but for us, it is important to show what do we realize in a year by all the investment that we have put in the ground. And that's where we are differentiated in terms of how much we are realizing every year because of all of these investments.
Yeah. I mean, you started early and part of Aramco is Aramco Digital. So what else do you do there?
Aramco Digital, we created a company called Aramco Digital. They will start expanding the business not only providing the business for Aramco, creating a lot of partnerships and extending their business outside. For example, if you go to Aramco, every day we receive 10 billion data points. So we created our meta-brains or large language models for Aramco, especially for Aramco, that help us to capitalize and make our operation more efficient. So we created this company that will help Aramco through the investment that we are putting in that company. And we're looking at almost $2 billion over the next three years in the digital company. And we have a huge partnership now with Humane, which is going to be the next players in AI and data centers, and in partnership with a lot of the technology companies. And Aramco is a significant partnership with Humane.
Right, because the whole thing with building these data centers is power.
You know, power, a lot of people, they don't, you know, by 2030 you need four times the energy required for all electric vehicles in the world just for data centers.
Well, you know, you have to build them fast, you don't have much time. And I see some of them building dedicated plants next to gas plants or gas fields to supply the power. You can do that in 18 months to two years to build an energy hub to supply power. But you need a lot of energy and everybody's looking at gas and that's why gas is coming into the picture and that's why Aramco is having huge investment because oil, as I said, we have healthy spare capacity, but gas, we are really building significant capacity by 2030.
