Lenovo beats Dell, Atos to snap up Petrobras supercomputer contract

China’s Lenovo beat US firm Dell and French group Atos (Bull) to win a contract to provide a new supercomputer to Brazil’s Petrobras.

The company presented a 510mn-real (US$93.5mn) bid in the tender, beating offers of 606mn reais and 556mn reais offered by Dell and Atos, respectively.

The new cluster of ultra-powerful servers, or high-performance computing (HPC), will be used mainly for physical imaging and geostatistical modeling, among other research and resource mapping applications.

In total, 13 companies signed up to participate in the bidding, but only Lenovo, Dell and Atos submitted proposals.

Those that declined to bid included key IT infrastructure players such as Schneider Electric, NTT Brasil and Multilaser. Minas Borracha was also disqualified for non-compliance with the tender terms.

Under the specifications presented by Petrobras, the manufacturer of the servers must have at least one HPC solution listed in the “TOP500 HPC Ranking" (http://top500.org).

Petrobras also required that the servers be certified by Nvidia, the processor company that has become the new darling of generative AI with its graphic processing units (GPUs).

Atos filed an appeal challenging the auction decision, arguing that the technical proposal presented by Lenovo did not meet the tender specifications.

According to the French group, Lenovo's proposal for its ThinkSystem SR675 V3 servers was not capable of providing the redundant power required by Petrobras for the project, among other points it mentioned.

After an analysis, Petrobras rejected Atos' challenge. According to the oil company, Lenovo's proposal presented a configuration of sources that ensure compliance with the redundancy requirements.

“The technical proposal presented by Lenovo not only meets all the requirements... of the tender, but exceeds them on several points, particularly due to the full compliance with Petrobras' requests during the negotiation phase,” the Brazilian state-controlled company said.

HPC

This is the first Petrobras supercomputer contract won by Lenovo.

At present, Petrobras boasts around 10 supercomputers, leading the way with these purchases in the Brazil. 

The machines for Petrobras have been built by companies such as Dell, HPE and Atos, among others. Atos has been the leading HPC supplier so far.

Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), the unit responsible for servers and storage, was created following the acquisition of IBM’s x86 server unit, which was finalized 10 years ago for over US$2.3 billion.

Recently, Lenovo ISG has set itself the goal of becoming the market leader in Latin America.

At present, it ranks third in ICT infrastructure in the region overall, behind Dell and HPE, but it is already second or first in some markets.

“We are managing to gain our space, firstly due to the quality of our services and products, secondly because we made a lot of investment in Latin America,” João Bortone, regional chief of Lenovo ISG, told BNamericas recently.

Bortone is former head of Dell Technologies infrastructure. He became CEO of Lenovo’s regional infrastructure unit in 2022.