TGS, a global leader in energy data and intelligence, has announced a major multi-year strategic agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), marking a significant step forward in the company’s long-term digital transformation. Under this agreement, TGS has officially selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider, strengthening its ability to deliver next-generation energy exploration solutions powered by high-performance computing (HPC) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). This partnership is designed to reshape how the energy sector accesses, processes, and interprets complex subsurface data, enabling faster decision-making and reducing uncertainty in exploration and development activities.
A Strategic Collaboration Designed to Transform Energy Exploration
The energy industry has always depended on high-quality geoscience and seismic intelligence to guide exploration decisions. However, as subsurface exploration becomes more complex and competition for resources increases, companies require faster and more accurate insight into geological structures. TGS’ partnership with AWS is designed to address these challenges by bringing cloud scalability, advanced analytics, and AI-driven automation into the core of geoscience workflows.
Through this multi-year collaboration, TGS aims to establish a new foundation for how subsurface data is processed and utilized. The integration of AWS computing capabilities with TGS’ vast seismic and geological datasets will accelerate time-to-insight for customers, helping them identify opportunities more quickly and make more informed investment decisions. By improving the speed and accuracy of exploration analysis, this partnership also supports the energy industry’s broader goal of optimizing resource extraction while lowering operational risks.
Building the Future of AI-Driven Seismic Imaging on AWS
A major focus of the collaboration is the advancement of TGS’ seismic imaging and analytics capabilities using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML). Seismic imaging is one of the most compute-intensive processes in the energy sector, requiring enormous amounts of data processing to generate accurate models of the subsurface. Traditionally, these workloads have been limited by the capacity of on-premise infrastructure, making scalability and speed major challenges.
By shifting more workloads onto AWS, TGS is modernizing its imaging workflows to surpass current industry performance standards. The company is accelerating its AI/ML-driven seismic imaging and analytics by building advanced solutions on AWS infrastructure, allowing it to deliver improved results at a faster pace. This transition provides TGS with the ability to expand computing capacity on demand, ensuring it can handle large-scale seismic workloads without delays caused by limited resources.
This transformation also supports TGS’ ability to continuously innovate. With access to AWS cloud services and next-generation hardware, TGS can develop and test new seismic imaging techniques more efficiently, helping it maintain its position as a technology leader in energy intelligence.
Modernizing TGS Imaging AnyWare for Cloud-First Delivery
A key element of the agreement is the modernization of TGS Imaging AnyWare on AWS. Imaging AnyWare is one of TGS’ mission-critical platforms, enabling customers to access advanced seismic processing capabilities and visualization tools. By migrating this platform onto AWS, TGS is enhancing its ability to provide seamless access to geoscience workflows while improving scalability and performance.
The cloud-based modernization allows TGS to take advantage of AWS elasticity, which enables workloads to scale up during peak demand and scale down when less processing is required. This dynamic approach not only improves speed but also helps optimize costs, ensuring resources are used efficiently.
Through this cloud-first model, customers will gain faster access to processing outputs and insights, improving project timelines and enabling more responsive decision-making. In an industry where exploration decisions can involve investments worth billions of dollars, reducing processing time while improving accuracy can provide significant strategic value.
Leveraging AWS High-Performance Computing to Scale at Massive Levels
Seismic imaging and subsurface analytics require the ability to run highly parallel workloads, often processing petabytes of data across thousands of computing nodes. TGS is leveraging Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to execute these workloads at an unprecedented scale. Using AWS infrastructure, TGS can rapidly scale to millions of CPUs, enabling it to deliver rapid turnaround times for complex exploration projects.
This capability is especially important for advanced seismic imaging methods that require extensive computational power. Instead of being limited by fixed on-premise systems, TGS can now expand computing resources instantly, ensuring it can handle large customer projects without compromising performance.
AWS cloud scalability also supports faster delivery of results, which can significantly reduce exploration timelines. In competitive exploration environments, the ability to gain subsurface insights earlier than competitors can create a major advantage.
Advanced NVIDIA GPU Instances and Specialized AWS Accelerators
To further enhance performance, TGS is leveraging AWS’ latest NVIDIA GPU instances and selectively adopting specialized AWS hardware accelerators. GPUs are critical for compute-intensive seismic imaging techniques, particularly those involving deep learning and high-resolution modeling. By utilizing cutting-edge GPU infrastructure, TGS can deliver high-definition seismic imaging outputs that improve subsurface interpretation.
One of the most advanced applications enabled through this partnership is Elastic Full Waveform Inversion (eFWI), a highly sophisticated seismic imaging method that requires extreme computational power. eFWI provides a more detailed and accurate subsurface model compared to traditional methods, improving exploration confidence and reducing uncertainty.
With AWS infrastructure supporting these workloads, TGS can provide eFWI capabilities at scale, making it more accessible for large exploration projects. This strengthens TGS’ ability to offer customers a deeper understanding of geological formations, improving the success rate of exploration campaigns.
Delivering Petabyte-Scale Data to Customers On Demand
TGS is known for managing one of the largest subsurface seismic data libraries in the world. Delivering these massive datasets efficiently is essential for enabling exploration teams to access critical information when needed. Under the AWS agreement, TGS is enabling petabyte-scale multi-client data delivery through the cloud, allowing customers to retrieve and process seismic data on demand.
This cloud-enabled approach removes many of the traditional barriers associated with handling large seismic datasets. Instead of requiring customers to maintain costly storage infrastructure, TGS can provide cloud-based access to datasets with the flexibility to scale as projects expand.
By integrating cloud distribution with high-performance analytics, TGS customers can work with seismic data faster, enabling exploration teams to move from data access to interpretation without long delays.
Building Secure, Resilient Multi-Region Cloud Architecture
Security and reliability are critical in the energy industry, especially when dealing with sensitive exploration data. TGS is building its mission-critical solutions on a secure, elastic, and resilient multi-region architecture on AWS. This approach ensures that customer workloads remain protected while providing high availability and disaster recovery support.
The multi-region design improves reliability by distributing workloads across multiple AWS regions, reducing the risk of service disruption. It also supports faster data access for customers operating in different geographic locations, improving performance and reducing latency.
TGS is also leveraging the AWS Nitro System, a security-focused architecture that isolates workloads and provides strong protection for sensitive customer operations. Nitro ensures that customer environments are isolated at the hardware level, enhancing security and reducing risk.
Generative AI Meets Geoscience: A New Era of Subsurface Intelligence
TGS leadership has emphasized that this partnership represents a major turning point for geoscience. Kristian Johansen, CEO of TGS, highlighted that this agreement marks the convergence of Generative AI capabilities with the complex challenges of subsurface exploration.
By moving TGS Data Verse, recognized as the largest subsurface seismic library, along with the Imaging AnyWare platform to AWS, TGS is positioning itself to create a new exploration-ready atlas of the subsurface. This shift enables the translation of massive subsurface datasets into actionable intelligence at unprecedented scale and speed.
For customers, this means faster prospect generation, stronger exploration confidence, and improved competitive positioning. Instead of relying on slower traditional analysis methods, energy companies can leverage AI-powered interpretation tools that enhance decision-making.
This collaboration is not just about migrating data to the cloud. It represents a fundamental rethinking of how subsurface information is transformed into strategic exploration insight.
Developing a Multi-Modal Subsurface Foundation Model on AWS
One of the most innovative aspects of the agreement is TGS’ deployment of a multi-modal Subsurface Foundation Model (SFM). This model is being developed using Amazon Bedrock and powered by Amazon SageMaker HyperPods, allowing TGS to build an AI system capable of processing multiple forms of subsurface data simultaneously.
A multi-modal approach is essential because subsurface understanding requires combining different types of information, including seismic data, geological models, well logs, and other exploration datasets. Traditionally, integrating these datasets has been a complex and time-consuming process, often requiring manual workflows and specialized interpretation.
The Subsurface Foundation Model aims to change this by enabling automated learning across diverse data types, providing a more comprehensive and unified understanding of subsurface structures. By processing different datasets simultaneously, the model can uncover insights that may have been previously unattainable using conventional methods.
This breakthrough has the potential to redefine exploration workflows, enabling more accurate subsurface predictions and improving exploration success rates.
AWS Perspective: Unlocking Value Through Cloud and AI Innovation
AWS executives have emphasized that this agreement demonstrates how cloud computing and Generative AI are becoming central to the transformation of energy exploration. Uwem Ukpong, Vice President of AWS Industries, stated that by combining AWS advanced computing and AI capabilities with TGS’ domain expertise and extensive energy data library, energy companies can unlock greater value from seismic datasets.
The partnership also supports broader integration initiatives across the energy sector. Through Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Energy Data Integration with TGS, companies can streamline how subsurface data is accessed and utilized. OSDU is designed to create standardized data frameworks that allow energy companies to integrate datasets more efficiently.
This integration supports optimization of exploration workflows, risk reduction, and improved decision-making. By using intelligent analysis tools, energy companies can better interpret complex geological data and develop stronger strategies for exploration and development.
Building on a Strong Foundation of Existing AWS Migration Progress
This new agreement is not the beginning of the relationship between TGS and AWS. TGS has already migrated petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, demonstrating both scale and commitment to this strategic direction. This existing progress provides a strong foundation for the deeper collaboration now being established.
By migrating large-scale datasets in advance, TGS has proven that it can effectively manage cloud-based data operations. This also means that customers are already benefiting from improved accessibility and scalability, with the new agreement expanding these capabilities further.
The migration progress reflects TGS’ long-term strategy to modernize its infrastructure and deliver more advanced digital services to the energy sector.
Supporting Global Operations and Regional Data Sovereignty
Energy exploration is a global industry, but it often involves strict regulatory requirements related to data sovereignty. Many countries require that certain data processing activities be performed within national borders. AWS’ global infrastructure allows TGS to address these challenges by providing in-country processing capabilities where required.
TGS has already demonstrated this capability through advanced projects such as eFWI in Brazil, where AWS in-country GPU capability enabled high-performance seismic imaging while meeting regional compliance requirements. This approach ensures low-latency processing, stronger performance, and adherence to local regulations.
By using AWS’ worldwide infrastructure, TGS can support customers in multiple regions while ensuring compliance with data governance rules. This makes the partnership valuable not only from a technology perspective but also from a regulatory and operational standpoint.
A Long-Term Vision for Competitive Advantage in the Energy Sector
The partnership between TGS and AWS reflects a broader shift occurring across the energy industry. As exploration becomes more complex, companies require advanced technology platforms capable of turning massive datasets into meaningful insight. TGS is positioning itself at the center of this transformation by combining its extensive data library with AWS cloud scalability and AI innovation.
For TGS customers, the benefits of this collaboration include faster project turnaround times, improved subsurface understanding, reduced exploration risk, and the ability to access petabyte-scale data on demand. These improvements can translate into stronger exploration strategies and better resource development decisions.
By embracing Generative AI, advanced HPC infrastructure, and cloud-native architecture, TGS is helping the energy sector move toward a new era of exploration intelligence. The strategic agreement with AWS is designed not only to modernize operations but also to redefine how subsurface data is interpreted, shared, and transformed into competitive advantage.
As this multi-year collaboration continues, TGS and AWS are expected to co-innovate further, developing new solutions that push the boundaries of what is possible in geoscience. With the combination of cloud performance, AI-driven automation, and one of the world’s most extensive subsurface data libraries, the partnership represents a significant leap forward for energy exploration and resource development worldwide.
Source Link:https://press.aboutamazon.com/
