Business Description

Overview Noble Corporation plc, a public limited company incorporated under the laws of England and Wales (“Noble”), is a leading offshore drilling contractor for the oil and gas industry. We provide contract drilling services to the international oil and gas industry with our global fleet of mobile offshore drilling units. We deliver our services through a high-specification fleet of floating and jackup rigs and the deployment of our drilling rigs in oil and gas basins around the world. Noble and its predecessors have been engaged in the contract drilling of oil and gas wells since 1921. As of December 31, 2025, our fleet of 36 drilling rigs consisted of 25 floaters and 11 jackups. On June 9, 2024, Noble entered into an agreement and plan of merger (the “Diamond Merger Agreement”) with Diamond Offshore Drilling, Inc. (“Diamond”), Dolphin Merger Sub 1, Inc., and Dolphin Merger Sub 2, Inc., under which Noble would acquire Diamond in a stock plus cash transaction (the “Diamond Transaction”). On September 4, 2024 (the “Diamond Closing Date”), Noble completed its acquisition of Diamond. For additional information, see “Note 2 — Acquisitions and Divestitures” to our consolidated financial statements included in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. References in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to “Noble,” the “Company,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer collectively to Noble and its consolidated subsidiaries on and after the Diamond Closing Date, as applicable. Contract Drilling Services We report our contract drilling operations as a single reportable segment, Contract Drilling Services, which reflects how we manage our business. The mobile offshore drilling units comprising our offshore rig fleet operate in a global market for contract drilling services and are often redeployed to different regions due to changing demands of our customers, which consist primarily of large, integrated, independent, and government-owned or controlled oil and gas companies throughout the world. We typically provide contract drilling services under an individual contract on a dayrate basis. Each contract’s final terms and conditions are the result of negotiations with our customers or other counterparties, and many contracts are awarded through a competitive bidding process. The following terms generally describe the key aspects of our contracts: • contract duration extending over a specific period of time or a period necessary to drill a defined number of wells; • payment of compensation to us (generally in US dollars, although some customers or other counterparties, typically national oil companies, require a part of the compensation to be paid in local currency) on a “daywork” basis, so that we receive a fixed amount (unless the contract contains a performance-based component) for each day (“dayrate”) that the drilling unit is operating under contract (a lower rate or no compensation is payable during periods of equipment breakdown and repair, adverse weather, or in the event operations are interrupted by other conditions, some of which may be beyond our control); • provisions permitting early termination of the contract by the customer or other counterparties (i) if the unit is lost or destroyed, (ii) if operations are suspended for a specified period of time due to breakdown of equipment or breach of contract, or (iii) for convenience with the payment of contractually specified termination amounts; • provisions allowing the impacted party to terminate the contract if specified “force majeure” events beyond the contracting parties’ control occur for a defined period of time; • payment by us of the operating expenses of the drilling unit, including labor costs and the cost of incidental supplies; • provisions that allow us to recover our mobilization and demobilization costs associated with moving a drilling unit from one regional location to another which, under certain market conditions, may not allow us to receive full reimbursement of such costs; • provisions that allow us to recover certain cost increases from our customers in certain long-term contracts; • provisions that require us to lower dayrates for documented cost decreases in certain long-term contracts; and 6 • provisions that allocate responsibility and liability through indemnification provisions for risks related to personal injury, property damage or loss, environmental damages, damage to the reservoir, and other matters.…