The rapid rise of artificial intelligence gives the world’s largest oil companies a major incentive to increase their investments in renewable energy, according to Sultan al-Jaber, the chief executive of Abu Dhabi’s national oil company. “The size of this opportunity only became very apparent about 18 months ago when ChatGPT took off,” said Jaber in an interview with the Financial Times. He spoke as the chief executives of oil groups Shell, BP and TotalEnergies met tech companies including Microsoft, financiers including Mark Carney, the chair of Brookfield Asset Management, and the heads of power suppliers RWE and EDF in Abu Dhabi to discuss how to meet the growing energy needs of AI and how the technology could be applied across the energy sector. Both Shell and BP have pulled back from renewables in the past two years to refocus on their core oil and gas businesses. But Jaber said the huge growth of AI would prompt oil groups to look again at their renewables businesses. The big tech companies have pledged to use green energy for their AI data centres to meet their net zero targets. “This specific topic was very much discussed,” he said. “We need a model that will integrate all forms of energy together. We will need more renewable energy and we need to advance battery storage technology to turn renewables from intermittent power to baseload. We need gas as a bridge and we will need, in some locations, nuclear power.”  Jonathan Ross, chief executive of AI chip company Groq, said he had met the heads of BP and Shell and that renewable energy had been “a huge topic”. “Because AI is going to require huge amounts of energy we need to get ahead of this,” he said, adding that he hoped to provide more computing power for energy companies going forward.

Full report : Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan al-Jaber says AI gives oil firms incentive to invest in renewables, as ADNOC unveils plans for integrating AI agents.