In a release sent to Rigzone recently by the Tape Ark team, Tape Ark revealed that it had bagged a “multi-million dollar oil and gas AI enablement contract”.
Tape Ark announced in that release that it had “secured a multi-million dollar contract with a major U.S. oil and gas exploration company to liberate and modernize one of the industry’s largest legacy tape archives in readiness for massive petabyte scale AI programs”.
Tape Ark, which described itself in the release as the global leader in large-scale tape to cloud data migration, revealed in the statement that the contract was awarded “after an extensive global evaluation”. The company highlighted that the deal will see Tape Ark migrate over 50 petabytes of critical exploration and production data from legacy tapes into the cloud, “enabling advanced AI, analytics, faster access to historical data, and compliance with evolving energy-sector data retention standards”.
Guy Holmes, Founder and CEO of Tape Ark, said in the statement that “this partnership represents a major milestone in our North American expansion”.
“For decades, vital subsurface and operational data in the energy sector has remained trapped on aging tapes. We’re proud to be the company trusted to bring this data to life – securely, at scale, and in the cloud,” he added.
“This contract is more than a migration – it’s a digital transformation of decades of exploration intelligence,” Holmes continued.
“By unlocking this data and enabling it for scalable AI, our client will gain an entirely new layer of insight and operational value. Our expansion and investment plans are about making that possible for organizations worldwide,” Holmes went on to state.
Tape Ark noted in its release that the deal “follows recent large-scale projects globally for major broadcasters, governments, and oil companies”.
In a statement posted on its website back in June, Tape Ark highlighted that “data is currency” in the oil and gas sector but warned that “much of it sits dormant on aging magnetic tapes”.
“These archives often hold seismic insights critical to exploration, development, and compliance, yet they remain physically inaccessible, technically outdated, and economically impractical to restore at scale,” it added.
The company went on to note in that statement that “in a recent proof of concept (POC) project for a major Australian energy company, Tape Ark was asked to evaluate hundreds of legacy tapes spanning over 15 media formats”.
“What made this project unique wasn’t the migration of the data to AWS – it was that most of the value was uncovered before a single byte was read,” it said.
“Using AI and machine learning-driven techniques, Tape Ark demonstrated that massive cost savings, strategic insights, and compliance gains could be realized – simply by analyzing metadata, images, and RFID chips on the tapes,” it continued.
In a statement posted on its site in November last year, Tape Ark said it was “approached in 2024 to ingest numerous LTO tapes and external hard disk drives for a large Australian energy company.”
“The drives contained a large seismic survey collection that the company needed to archive and also share with joint venture partners located around the world,” Tape Ark added in that statement.
On its website, Tape Ark states that it is a technology company solely focused on migrating data to the cloud.
According to the site, Holmes “has enjoyed a 20+ year career of founding companies in the tape and data management space as well as a successful career in the international oil and gas industry”.
The Tape Ark site notes that Holmes is a “self-identified maverick” who “saw an opportunity with the early emergence of cloud computing to drive an innovative approach to data storage and management, which would enable organizations to liberate their data from legacy media to the cloud en masse”.
To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com
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