Emirates Global Aluminium cuts cost of manufacturing AI by 86 percent with the introduction of Azure Stack HCI

A digital manufacturing platform built to drive a new strategy

Based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), the largest premium aluminum producer in the world, produces one in every 25 tons of aluminum made globally. The industry giant is an integrated aluminum producer, with operations from bauxite mining to the production of cast primary aluminum and recycling. The company operates smelters in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, an alumina refinery in Abu Dhabi, a bauxite mine and associated export facilities in the Republic of Guinea, and a newly acquired specialty foundry in high-strength recycled aluminum in Germany. EGA’s bold aspiration is to innovate the future of aluminum production, and it relies on technology to make this a reality.

EGA has achieved several technology firsts in the UAE, stretching back 30 years. Both EGA and Microsoft are members of the UAE Industry 4.0 Champions Network, which is dedicated to accelerating and promoting a new wave of innovation in the country. They recently joined forces to move one-third of EGA’s server landscape from on-premises datacenters to the Azure public cloud, consolidating more than 600 servers in the process. “We have a world-class, mine-to-metal value chain, but we also have a need for a world-class digital value chain,” says Alexander Simon Kraehenbuehl, Director of Digital Platforms and Infrastructure at Emirates Global Aluminium.

Many manufacturing technology applications, including AI, must have proximity to company equipment for cybersecurity, latency, response time, and other factors. “We want AI decisions about our plant to be done with as little outside exposure and with as little reliance on networks and the internet as possible—and fully disconnected, if necessary,” explains Kraehenbuehl. “Because of this, we quickly realized that having only a public cloud strategy wouldn’t be enough to fully cover our portfolio of Industry 4.0 use cases.”

Bringing together public and hybrid clouds, EGA built a new digital manufacturing platform with a hybrid cloud architecture. It runs Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on top of Azure Stack HCI to take advantage of containerization on-premises and uses Azure Arc for a consistent management layer across its public and hybrid cloud environments. “Through Azure Stack HCI, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Arc, our data, AI, and applications can move effortlessly between the public and private cloud components of our digital manufacturing platform,” says Kraehenbuehl. “This allows us to implement sophisticated, large-scale AI use cases in an efficient and affordable way at the heart of the company, directly in our industrial operations.”

Connecting public and hybrid clouds using Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc, and AKS

EGA is almost four years into a comprehensive digital roadmap for the future. “We’ve come far on this journey without a digital manufacturing platform, but we came to a point where we have bigger, more complex, and costlier business opportunities that make this absolutely mandatory,” acknowledges Kraehenbuehl. “And now that we have it, the next use cases are already being developed, mainly around visual quality inspection and safety.”

The company is currently targeting real-time AI analytics use cases for image and video including green anode inspection, which is essential to the aluminum smelting process, and smart crane monitoring. “With our smart cranes, we have 2.9 petabytes of video data getting analyzed annually through an AI that’s running in our plant,” says Kraehenbuehl. “The response time we now get from AI on our digital manufacturing platform has improved by a factor of 13. A response that took over a second before is now down to subseconds and is more consistent because there’s less hops involved.” This directly accelerates how quickly the company can make critical production decisions.

These impressive metrics wouldn’t be possible without the company having its hybrid cloud solution natively connected to the Azure public cloud with Azure Stack HCI. “What’s important for me as the director of platforms and infrastructure is to have both choices—public and private cloud—and to be smart about what choice we make in different scenarios,” says Kraehenbuehl.

As EGA shifts between clouds, Azure Arc offers game-changing visibility and monitoring capabilities while minimizing training needs. “Azure Arc delivered the expected consistency in use case development, cybersecurity, and administration with high levels of productivity through automation,” says Kraehenbuehl. “How quickly our team was able to master the new environment and scale it to the size that use cases like smart cranes need speaks volumes about the capabilities of Azure Arc.”

The company also credits AKS as part of the bedrock of its new platform. “All of our new workloads are container-based with AKS, and now through Azure Arc, we can also deploy them quite seamlessly on our hybrid cloud if necessary,” says Kraehenbuehl. “We now have a fully streamlined, end-to-end, Microsoft-certified technology stack where all the different pieces work together, which allows us to focus on business value instead of technology patchworking.”

This seamless connection between Azure products helps EGA avoid re-engineering solutions every time it decides to move an application between the public and hybrid cloud. “We understand that a consistent digital environment is critical,” explains Kraehenbuehl. “The strong synergies with our existing public cloud environment made us choose the Azure stack over other setups that would have added more complexity and overhead, and with that, less efficiency.”

Surpassing expectations with significant cost and time savings

At the outset, EGA wanted a hybrid digital manufacturing platform to help drastically reduce the cost of its image- and video-based use cases, speed up the development process, and unlock business optimizations that hadn’t been possible before. “With its seamless hybrid cloud architecture, our new digital manufacturing platform outperforms our previous approach by orders of magnitude in terms of cost efficiency, AI response time, and business agility, allowing us to push the frontiers of our digital ambition,” notes Kraehenbuehl. “If you compare costs for our current use cases on the public cloud before and on our new Azure hybrid cloud digital manufacturing platform, we’re looking at an 86 percent cost reduction. We also went from weeks and months between releases to multiple a day, which allows us to respond much faster and better to changing business requirements.”

The company only needed three months to ramp up the digital manufacturing platform from conceptualization to having a first instance of the environment running at the edge and now operating multiple production workloads. The added efficiency and productivity brought on by the platform underscores EGA’s use of Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach to fundamentally rethink and modernize operational technology in a cloud-first era and embrace modern capabilities, such as generative AI. “It’s been a short yet intense journey to set up this environment, and its success is largely attributed to the strong relationship between Microsoft and EGA in identifying priorities and securing top-tier talent,” says Kraehenbuehl.

Cementing a cornerstone for ambition

With the digital manufacturing platform in place and evolving every day, EGA is on track to realize its ambitions of becoming a digital lighthouse. “Many organizations face challenges when implementing such assets, only to find them underutilized during the first years due to a lack of applicable use cases,” says Kraehenbuehl. “In our case, we operated at full capacity from the outset, and it’s growing every day.”

EGA is fully equipped with a strong foundation that will turbocharge its digital transformation roadmap moving forward. “Our management expects us to double the number of digital use cases that we implement every year, and our digital manufacturing platform is a cornerstone for this ambition,” says Kraehenbuehl.

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