Schneider Electric's AI Data Centre Solutions: Explained

Leading global energy management firm Schneider Electric is launching a range of comprehensive solutions to tackle the surging energy demands of AI infrastructure. It aims to do this in partnership with global chipmaker Nvidia, whilst continuing to prioritise its global sustainability goals.

Co-developed with Nvidia, Schneider Electric’s new data centre reference design will support liquid cooled, high-density AI clusters of up to 132 kilowatts (kW) per rack. The innovation will be optimised for Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 and Blackwell chips, providing a validated architecture that aims to simplify the deployment of liquid cooling at scale.

Schneider Electric has also introduced its new Galaxy VXL uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which the company claims is the industry's most compact, high-density UPS for AI and data centre workloads. 

This suite of solutions has come at a critical time and is designed to address growing sustainability challenges faced by global data centre operators that are wrestling with an increase in AI workloads. 

Having a clear strategy for the AI era

The data centre industry is currently having to confront a significant increase in power requirements, whilst having to maintain environmental pledges.

“By 2027, data centre electricity consumption is projected to account for 2.5% of global demand, with the remaining 97.5% spread across industries such as buildings, manufacturing, transportation and energy,” explains Sean Graham, Research Director, Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends at the IDC. 

“While data centres pursue their own net-zero goals amid unprecedented growth, the real sustainability promise lies in leveraging AI to decarbonise entire value chains across industries.”

Both of Schneider Electric’s solutions form part of the company’s end-to-end AI-ready data centre solution portfolio, which focuses on three key areas.

The company is seeking to help data centre owners and operators as they deploy energy efficient, high-density infrastructure to support both AI and sustainable innovation. Its collaboration with Nvidia marks a significant step in developing sustainable infrastructure for AI applications. 

“Building the future of accelerated computing and AI requires speed and a bedrock foundation,” says Jensen Huang, Nvidia Founder and CEO. “Our work with Schneider Electric enables customers to design the world's technological advances on stable and resilient infrastructure.”

Sean adds: “As Schneider Electric and NVIDIA have demonstrated, long-term collaboration and innovation are essential to driving efficiency and sustainability.”

Schneider Electric: A sustainability leader

With the environmental impact of AI growing at such a rapid pace, it is important for companies like Schneider Electric to lead by design and find new ways to decarbonise data centres and their digital infrastructure. 

The company’s announcements are designed to bolster its commitments to help its customers decarbonise their digital infrastructure around the world, whilst focusing on its strategies.

For the AI era, Schneider is supporting companies to secure renewable energy and optimising on-site power generation with diverse renewables like wind, solar and hydrogen. Likewise, it provides services such as site selection and geographical analysis based on customers’ deployment plans.

The company has also developed a comprehensive portfolio of high-density, energy-efficient infrastructure systems to cater to a range of AI needs. This includes data centre infrastructure components from grid-to-chip and chip-to-chiller, AI-powered remote monitoring and energy management software and digital services for lifecycle optimisation. 

Via its Sustainability Consulting business, Schneider Electric is helping customers exceed decarbonisation goals with its tailored sustainability strategies, emissions assessments and supplier engagement programmes. These global consulting services offer customers data-driven insights via EcoStruxure Resource Advisor, and are supported by 2,400 experts in 100+ countries.

Additionally, to address the increased temperatures of high-density workloads, Schneider Electric recently signed an agreement to acquire a majority stake in the Motivair Corporation, This strategic decision aims to enhance the company’s already-successful liquid cooling portfolio, whilst strengthening its expertise in direct-to-chip liquid cooling and high-capacity thermal solutions.

Confronting AI energy demands

More broadly, Schneider Electric is advocating for a science-based approach to ‘bend the curve’ of energy consumption in line with AI use. Central to this approach is employing “energy intelligence for sustainable AI”, the company says, which it believes can be achieved by integrating data centre infrastructure with AI-driven applications. 

"So, a new era of data centres. You might hear me say 'grid to chip' and 'chip to chiller' a few times today. At Schneider Electric, 

“We're one of the few companies out there that can really provide a full end-to-end solution for the customer,” Marc Garner, Senior Vice President, Secure Power Europe at Schneider Electric tells Data Centre Magazine.

“We can distribute that power all the way down to the chip to the point where it's consumed. With the acquisition of Motivair, we now have a full end-to-end solution that allows us to cool the chip.”

He adds: “We can extract that heat all the way through the system in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. It's not just about the product, it's about the sustainability team that sits behind it, in terms of the intelligent procurement of energy and making sure what we design right at the front end, with our Connect platform and the software systems that we have, operates the way it should do in design in the most sustainable way forward."

Confronting AI energy demands

More broadly, Schneider Electric is advocating for a science-based approach to ‘bend the curve’ of energy consumption in line with AI use. Central to this approach is employing “energy intelligence for sustainable AI”, the company says, which it believes can be achieved by integrating data centre infrastructure with AI-driven applications. 

"The conversation we've had with NVIDIA and the reference design that we put forward is really an end-to-end, grid to chiller reference design that allows us to support the infrastructure that they need in their server deployment up to 132kW per rack," Marc explains to Data Centre Magazine.

"Because we're able to do this full end-to-end lifecycle with sustainability in mind, we're able to provide some optimisation in the system design to make sure that sustainability stays at the forefront of what's required in the output. Obviously everyone's got their own take in terms of how they want to deploy the data centre, how they want their data centre to work and operate, but it's there to be able to support them in the directionally correct way that allows them to design."

He tells us: "We're learning every day in AI. So we're all learning at the same time. This allows our customers to have something that's a platform that's validated.

“We're talking with the chip manufacturers closely to make sure that we're able to give a fully validated reference design that allows us to be able to support the market and our customers and the data centre operators."

As a result, industries can not only mitigate AI's energy footprint but also use AI monitoring capabilities and insights as tools for broader decarbonisation efforts. Central to achieving this vision is a united commitment to deploying sustainable solutions to better leverage the potential of AI to drive efficiency across multiple industries. 

Jensen Huang states: “Together, we're creating AI data centres that are purpose-built for accelerated computing, supporting complex architectures that are essential to deliver digital intelligence to every company and industry.”

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