David Terry, Schneider Electric’s AI Enterprise & Alliance Partner Director for EMEA discusses the emergence of a new European AI ecosystem, and how partners are collaborating to help companies reap the benefits of AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI), and Generative AI (GenAI) have taken the world by storm, with many organisations leveraging the technology to increase productivity, profitability and efficiency. Indeed, Global analyst IDC predicts that global spending on AI will surpass $749 billion by 2028, and that this year alone, enterprise organisations could invest $307 billion in deploying AI solutions.
Importantly, a host of macroeconomic trends is also fuelling global growth and in the political space, both the UK Government and European policymakers are doubling down on their AI efforts via the InvestAI project and AI Opportunities Action Plan – tying technology adoption with economic success, while propelling AI Factories and data centres into the spotlight.
With the channel accounting for 73 per cent of the total IT market in 2024, AI also represents a significant opportunity for partners to catalyse growth, and research firm Canalys believes that GenAI will be the catalyst for a multiyear investment cycle across all IT segments. AI for infrastructure (AIOps), AI-enabled software applications, high-density infrastructure, and the accompanying services, for example, will all help companies adopt, train, and utilise AI – creating a $158.6 billion market opportunity by 2028.
The AI Factories of the Future
At this years’ VivaTech Live, and NVIDIA’s first GTC Paris conference, NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, spoke of the power of the AI ecosystem, and how AI Factories, Agentic AI, and Physical AI will power a new European industrial revolution.
For that technology to deliver the value expected every part of the AI ecosystem – from its Hyperscale, cloud and colocation providers, Compute, Storage and Network organisations, to its Vendors, Systems Integrators and GPU Cloud Providers – will be fundamental, transforming Europe into an AI continent, while enabling a new wave of AI Startups, developers and researchers to thrive there.
At Schneider Electric, we too believe these partnerships are vital to underpin Europe’s AI infrastructure ambitions, which is why we’ve partnered with NVIDIA to combine our expertise in AI-ready data centres, sustainability, buildings and the grid, with NVIDIA’s leadership in Accelerated Computing – supporting the European Commission’s AI Continent Action Plan and helping to take it from inception to delivery.
To achieve this not only requires a robust approach to deploying AI infrastructure solutions engineered for AI, however, but one where Alliances with other ecosystem providers such as Microsoft, Dell, HPE, Arrow, and AVEVA will be vital for success.
As AI proliferation continues, businesses must continue to work with likeminded partners to deliver a future which will be transformed and enabled by a new generation of AI technologies, including Agentic AI solutions and in time, physical AI in the form of advanced robotics.
Partner opportunities in the era of AI
For channel partners, the AI era presents a key opportunity for growth via the sales of physical infrastructure equipment, and through the specialist services needed to design, deploy and modernise these high-density environments.
No matter the location, optimising customers’ IT infrastructure to leverage the power-intensive requirements of AI will be critical, key trend of legacy sites undertaking modernisation projects to host air-cooled GPUs alongside the latest breakthroughs in AI solutions.
At the same time, both legacy and newer generations of CPU and GPU technologies are demanding more power and cooling resources than traditional enterprise compute, causing data centre electricity consumption to surge. Some estimates, for example, suggest that data centre energy demands will grow 160% by 2030, and that data centres could consume up-to 3-4 per cent of total power by the end of the decade.
As a result, AI Factories require specialist data centre and physical infrastructure systems, high-density racks, resilient power protection and highly efficient liquid cooling – requirements which can create a host of design and operational complexities when constructing facilities that are sovereign, sustainable, secure and scalable.
Digital twins’ technology is, therefore, also vital, enabling partners to conceptualise both data centres and AI Factories and to design them to the highest standards of efficiency. Together with NVIDIA and ETAP we have unveiled a new digital twin that enables partners to design and simulate the power requirements of AI Factories – leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse to deliver significant efficiency, reliability and sustainability gains from the grid to the chip.
Diversification of skill sets
Another key change is in the skill sets required to meet AI demand, and at Schneider it is expected we will see a complete diversification in partner specialisations and alliances, with more manufacturers delivering AI-specific specialisations and training.
Moving forwards, we believe there will be greater global demand for systems integration skillsets, for example, and expect new alliances to be established between manufacturers, partners, and chipmakers seeking to deliver pre-integrated and prefabricated solutions to customers, meeting requirements for both speed and scale.
This is an approach which will transform the ecosystem, creating a new set of specialist distributors who can also work with, train and empower partners, giving them access to sovereign, scalable, and energy efficient AI infrastructure.
Our partnership with Arrow Electronics, for example, enables partners to meet demand for emerging technologies with sustainable, end-to-end solutions, specifically engineered for high-density AI infrastructure, high-performance computing (HPC) and hybrid-cloud applications. In turn, collaboration with other partners, including MSPs, ISVs, cloud, telco and enterprise organisations is also essential to serve traditional enterprise or AI demand, and we foresee these ecosystems expanding simultaneously.
Fundamentally, the partner landscape is evolving around AI, and with no slowdown in sight, supporting our partners and customers with expertise in AI and critical infrastructure will enable the businesses to take huge leaps forward, and realise the benefits of AI. This, I believe, will be also key to help channel partners stay one step ahead of the growth curve, and build the skills needed to deliver the AI Fac
