Honeywell launches industrial AI platform at Dangote’s Lekki refinery

Forge Plant Cognition combines process expertise with NVIDIA and Dell technology; the projected financial benefit remains an estimate.

Honeywell Technologies announced Forge Plant Cognition on October 26, with its first launch at Dangote’s petroleum refinery in Lekki, Nigeria. The industrial AI platform combines Honeywell’s process and automation expertise with NVIDIA capabilities and Dell infrastructure.

The company says the system is intended to identify production constraints, anticipate equipment and process issues, and make specialist knowledge more accessible to operators. Its description combines operating data with engineering knowledge and physics-based models.

The benefit is a forecast

Honeywell estimates potential operational gains above 29 cents per barrel, or more than $60 million annually at full-capacity throughput. The announcement explicitly calls the estimate preliminary and facility-specific. It is gross of implementation costs and is not guaranteed.

That matters when comparing an AI project with an operating result. A projected annual benefit is an investment case; a measured improvement requires a defined baseline and evidence from the plant after implementation.

A stack built around plant operations

Honeywell names NVIDIA Nemotron models for agents interpreting operating data and Omniverse libraries for a plant digital twin. It also describes Cosmos models with a Metropolis vision blueprint for anomaly detection and PhysicsNemo for physics AI models. Dell supplies the infrastructure through its AI Factory with NVIDIA.

Those pieces target different parts of an industrial workflow: interpreting measurements, seeing anomalies and simulating process behaviour. The announcement’s aim is to connect them with Honeywell’s engineering knowledge rather than offer a general chatbot beside the control room. The projected benefit still requires operational evidence from the implementation, including its actual costs.

Sources

- [Honeywell launches Forge Plant Cognition](https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/news/press-releases/2026/10/honeywell-technologies-launches-forge-plant-cognition-with-dangote-built-with-ndivia-ai-dell-technologies) — Honeywell