The race to establish large-scale AI infrastructure in Europe has taken a significant step forward, with Schneider Electric announcing a strategic expansion of its partnership with NVIDIA to support the development and deployment of AI factories. The collaboration was unveiled today at NVIDIA GTC in Paris and is focused on building modular, scalable, and energy-efficient infrastructure capable of supporting the next generation of AI workloads.
This move places Schneider Electric at the heart of the European Commission’s digital strategy, aligning its product roadmap with key initiatives such as the €200 billion InvestAI programme and the “AI Continent Action Plan”, which calls for the creation of 13 AI factories and up to five AI gigafactories across the EU. These facilities are intended to serve as the backbone for Europe’s industrial-scale AI capabilities, enabling the deployment of generative models, accelerated computing applications and sovereign data strategies.
Building the backbone of AI production
At the core of the announcement is a set of co-developed reference designs and infrastructure systems tailored to the demands of AI data centres. This includes new modular EcoStruxure Pod Data Center units and a NVIDIA-enabled rack solution built to support the high-density NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platform. The rack design is based on NVIDIA’s MGX modular architecture and has been developed to support liquid-cooled, high-performance computing systems capable of handling the thermal and power loads associated with large AI training and inference workloads.
The new rack marks Schneider Electric’s formal integration into NVIDIA’s HGX and MGX ecosystems, an important development as the computing demands of AI factories surpass what conventional data centre configurations can deliver. Schneider’s systems are engineered to reduce deployment time while supporting the density, redundancy and efficiency required for hyperscale AI infrastructure.
The collaboration also includes advanced R&D into power systems, cooling technologies and control architectures. Following its acquisition of Motivair in March 2025, Schneider Electric now incorporates direct-to-chip and CDU-based liquid cooling technologies into its AI infrastructure portfolio. These capabilities are seen as critical to addressing the thermal challenges posed by high-performance GPUs and AI accelerators operating at scale.
A coordinated response to European AI ambitions
As AI becomes a strategic resource for economic competitiveness and technological sovereignty, the question of infrastructure readiness is becoming increasingly urgent. With model sizes increasing and inference workloads proliferating, nations and regions are looking to secure their place in the AI value chain. The Schneider–NVIDIA partnership offers a roadmap for doing so at speed and scale.
The effort goes beyond product development. The partnership also includes digital twin capabilities for power and electrical systems using the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint. This integration allows for real-time simulation of data centre infrastructure from grid to chip level, supporting predictive maintenance, energy efficiency and dynamic load management, an essential feature as European grids face the demands of electrification and digitalisation simultaneously.
The announcement represents a shift in how AI is approached in policy and infrastructure planning. AI factories are no longer abstract concepts, but physical facilities underpinned by engineering choices that must balance scale, resilience and sustainability. By combining Schneider Electric’s industrial technology expertise with NVIDIA’s computing platforms, the two companies aim to remove barriers to deployment and establish the groundwork for a new class of data centre built specifically for AI.
As public and private sectors converge on large-scale AI investment, infrastructure is emerging as a key differentiator. The success of initiatives such as the EU’s InvestAI will depend not just on algorithms and talent, but on the ability to deploy compute at scale, quickly and efficiently. Schneider Electric and NVIDIA’s joint platform may prove a critical component in delivering that ambition.
