Equinor starts production at Bacalhau field offshore Brazil

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Equinor starts production at Bacalhau field offshore Brazil

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Equinor started production from Bacalhau field in the Santos basin presalt offshore Brazil.

The field has more than 1 billion boe recoverable reserves and is the largest international offshore field ever developed by Equinor.

Bacalhau lies 185 km from the coast of the municipality of Ilhabela, in the state of São Paulo, at a water depth of 2,050 m. Bacalhau is Brazil’s first integrated subsea production systems (SPS) and subsea pipelines (SURF) project.

Production is via a floating, production, storage, and offloading vessel (FPSO) measuring 370 m in length and 64 m in width, with a production capacity of 220,000 bo/d.

Equinor is operator at Bacalhau with 40% interest. Partners are ExxonMobil 40%, Petrogal Brasil 20%, and Pré-sal Petróleo SA (government company, PSA manager).

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Equinor starts production at Bacalhau field offshore Brazil

AI’s dark side shows in Gartner’s top predictions for IT orgs

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AI deployment uses multiple storage layers, and each one has different requirements, says Dell’Oro’s Fung. For storing massive amounts of unstructured, raw data, cold storage on HDDs makes more sense, he says. SSDs make sense for warm storage, such as for pre-processing data and for post-training and inference. “There’s a place for each type of storage,” he says. Planning ahead According to Constellation’s Mehta, data center managers and other storage buyers should prepare by treating SSD procurement like they do GPUs. “Multi-source, lock in lanes early, and engineer to standards so vendor swaps don’t break your data path.” He recommends qualifying at least two vendors for both QLC and TLC and starting early. TrendForce’s Ao agrees. “It is better to build inventory now,” he says. “It is difficult to lock-in long term deals with suppliers now due to tight supply in 2026.” Based on suppliers’ availability, Kioxia, SanDisk, and Micron are in the best position to support 128-terabyte QLC enterprise SSD solutions, Ao says. “But in the longer term, some module houses may be able to provide similar solutions at a lower cost,” Ao adds. “We are seeing more module houses, such as Phison and Pure Storage, supporting these solutions.” And it’s not just SSD for fast storage and HDD for slow storage. Memory solutions are becoming more complex in the AI era, says Ao. “For enterprise players with smaller-scale business models, it is important to keep an eye on Z-NAND and XL-Flash for AI inference demand,” he says. These are memory technologies that sit somewhere between the SSDs and the RAM working memory. “These solutions will be more cost-effective compared to HBM or even HBF [high bandwidth flash],” he says.

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Meanwhile, in a release issued last week, CoreWeave stated, “it has been unequivocal — to Core Scientific and publicly — that we will not modify our offer. Our offer is best and final.” Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said what happens next with the overall data center market “depends on when AI demand slows down (when the AI bubble bursts).” He added, “if AI demand continues, prices continue to go up, and data centers change in terms of preferred locations (cooler climates, access to water, lots of space, more remote), use of microgrids/energy production, expect [major] players to continue to dominate.” However, said Nguyen, “if that slowdown is soon, then prices will drop, and the key players will need to either unload property or hold onto them until AI demand builds back up.” Generational shift occurring Asked what the overall effect of AI will be on CIOs in need of data center capacity, he said, “the new AI mega-factories alter data center placement: you don’t put them near existing communities because they demand too much power, water, land, you build them somewhere remote, and communities will pop up around them.” Smaller data centers, said Nguyen, “will still consume power and water in contention with their neighbors (industrial, commercial, and residential), potential limiting their access or causing costs to rise. CIOs and Network World readers should evaluate the trade offs/ROI of not just competing for data center services, but also for being located near a new data center.”

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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Stay Ahead, Stay ONMINE

Equinor starts production at Bacalhau field offshore Brazil

Stay Ahead

Explore More Insights

Equinor starts production at Bacalhau field offshore Brazil

AI’s dark side shows in Gartner’s top predictions for IT orgs

AI dominates Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2026

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Trump Again Says India PM Agreed to Ease Russian Energy Buys

IEA: Global oil market to see huge oversupply

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Valeura Energy finds JV partner for Thrace deep gas play testing

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