TotalEnergies has signed a contract with Dell Technologies and Nvidia to build a new high-performance computing (HPC) system, in a deal worth more than €100 million ($117.4m).

Dubbed Pangea-5, the system will be installed at the company’s Jean Féger Scientific and Technical Center in Pau, southern France, and is expected to come online in 2027. It will replace the existing Pangea infrastructure, offering six times the computing capacity, the company claims.

TotalEnergies is deploying the machine primarily to advance seismic imaging for hydrocarbon exploration and to support AI-driven research across integrated power modeling and other complex computational workloads.

According to the companies, the hardware will rely on Nvidia GPUs, CPUs, and InfiniBand networking to deliver massively parallel processing. Dell is handling design and installation. TotalEnergies claims that Pangea 5 will use roughly 40 percent less power than its predecessor at equivalent performance, with cooling energy requirements cut by a factor of five. Waste heat from the system will be piped into the CSTJF campus to support its district heating system.

The company has been running a HPC computing system out of its Pau campus since 2013, with the latest unit being the system’s fifth iteration. The Pangea moniker refers to Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, the same geological framework that underpins modern hydrocarbon exploration.

“By increasing our computing power sixfold, we are strengthening our leadership in high-performance computing, ensuring that our expert teams continue to have the means to push the envelope to support the development of our activities and meet the growing global demand for energy,” said Namita Shah, president of OneTech at TotalEnergies.

Adrian McDonald, president of Dell Technologies EMEA, added: “Pangea 5 will give TotalEnergies the computing power to accelerate discovery, increase efficiency, and drive the energy transition forward – that’s exactly the kind of outcome our collaboration is built for.”

John Josephakis, vice president of HPC and AI at Nvidia, said the platform’s architecture is “capable of meeting the most demanding industrial and energy challenges, both today and in the years to come.”

Total has increasingly sought to deploy AI and HPC to support its operations. Last September, the French firm expanded its partnership with generative AI firm Cognite to scale Cognite’s industrial data and AI platform across the entirety of Total’s upstream asset base. The deployment, which will take place over three years, will cover all of Total’s value chain from drilling to production.

Headquartered in Paris, TotalEnergies has a presence in about 120 countries and a global workforce of more than 100,000 people. Its integrated energy operations span oil, natural gas, biofuels, hydrogen, renewables, and electricity. The company has signed several energy supply agreements with tech firms.