Exploration and discovery in the age of the supercomputer

Posted: February 16, 2026

HPC6 is the sixth most powerful supercomputer in the world. Its peak computational power is 606 petaflops, meaning it can theoretically perform over 600,000 trillion calculations a second. Yet this staggering power is not the most remarkable thing about HPC6—that would be who owns it.

Of the world’s top 10 supercomputers, eight are funded by governments. One of the remaining two belongs to Microsoft, running as a cluster across multiple data centers.

That leaves HPC6, bankrolled not by a nation-state or big tech, but by Eni, the Italian oil supermajor. Eni also operates HPC6, housing it in a purpose-built data center not far from its headquarters in Milan.

Energy companies have long turned to high-performance computers to crunch seismic imaging data and reveal the location of hydrocarbon deposits, but Eni’s investment is unique in its the scale. Only Exxon, which last year announced the latest iteration of its Discovery supercomputer, comes remotely close to rivalling Eni for computing power.

That raises an obvious question. Why—at a time when building data centers and harnessing vast compute are becoming the province of specialist tech companies—has an Italian energy company spent an estimated €100 million on its latest supercomputer?

Although undeniably unusual, HPC6 is not the quixotic side project it first appears to be. Indeed, not only is the supercomputer underpinning the company’s current (and also unusual) business model; Eni is hoping it will position the company to thrive during the next era of energy—one dominated by wind, solar and nuclear fusion.

Big discoveries and satellite companies

In December of last year, Eni announced “a significant gas discovery” in the Kutei Basin, off the coast of Indonesia. “Estimates indicate 600 billion cubic feet of gas initially in place with a potential upside beyond 1 trillion cubic feet,” said the company in a press release.

The Kutei Basin find is just the latest in a string of supercomputer-assisted discoveries for Eni. In 2024 and 2021, it made large discoveries in the West-African waters off of Côte d’Ivoire. In 2015, it made a massive, headline-grabbing discovery off the coast of Egypt. Before that, it discovered major deposits off the East-African waters of Mozambique.

These successes have led to industry acclaim—in 2024, Eni was named the “most-admired explorer” for a record-equaling fifth time in Wood Mackenzie’s annual exploration survey—but they have also given rise to a challenge.

“We discover a lot of resources,” Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi told Bloomberg TV at ADIPEC in November 2025, “and when you discover a lot of resources, you need to invest a lot. But we have also […] to keep down our debt. So we have to grow, without investing too much.”

Translation: Eni discovers more deposits than it can afford to extract.

The company’s solution has been to adopt what it has alternatively called a “dual exploration” or “satellite” model. This model involves forming separate companies or selling minority stakes in claims, thereby bringing in the necessary cash to exploit discoveries without having to borrow anything.

The recent Kutei Basin discovery is a product of this model. Just one month before announcing the discovery, Eni formed a new company in a joint venture with Petronas, Malaysia’s state-owned energy outfit. One of the reasons for forming the company was to maximize the potential of the Kutei Basin.

While the satellite model is primarily a financial exercise, it is made possible by the computational power of HPC6 (and its five predecessors). That becomes especially clear when looking at Eni’s satellite companies that aren’t involved in hydrocarbon extraction.

Plenitude is one such company. It owns renewable electricity assets, installs EV charging infrastructure, and sells heat and power to buildings across Europe. Eni says HPC6 is used for meteorological simulations—a critical activity in the successful running of weather-dependent wind and solar assets.

HPC6 and a different kind of discovery

For all Eni’s recent oil and gas discoveries, the golden era of discovery looks to be over.

In his introduction to a 2025 report on exploration, Westwood Energy’s Jamie Collard noted that the exploration industry is finding “less than half of the volumes” it did before 2015. “Exploration has become more efficient,” he continued, “but the decline in discovered resource reflects a diminishing global opportunity set.”

Given this context of shrinking deposits—not to mention the looming, though perennially delayed, prospect of “peak oil”—HPC6 would likely not be able to justify its colossal power (and price tag) if it was only being used to locate hydrocarbon deposits and optimize renewables. But HPC6 is also being used in pursuit of an altogether different class of discoveries: scientific ones.

Late last year, Eni called for projects that, using HPC6, could have “a significant impact on the energy transition and technological competitiveness.” The winning proposals originating from startups, universities and research centers, span meteorology, material science, quantum computing and nuclear fusion.

Eni’s interest in that latter area appears especially serious. Since 2023, it has been in a strategic partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, one of the leading startups in the race to build a commercial-scale nuclear fusion reactor.

Headlining the partnership is a $1-billion commitment from Eni to purchase electricity from CFS’s power plant, which is currently under construction in U.S. state of Virginia. Perhaps more meaningful, however, is  HPC6's role in developing CFS's technology—the supercomputer is being used to simulate plasma behavior inside the startup's fusion reactor.

At a time when demand for fossil fuels is proving more resilient than many were expecting, thanks in part to the energy demands of AI, HPC6 is recasting the relationship between energy and technology in a refreshing way.

“The history of Eni and supercomputers is a long love story, dating back at least 50 years,” Lorenzo Fiorillo, one of Eni’s technology directors, said after HPC6 was first booted up.

The affair continues.