Hopes joint reference architecture will be used in AI Continent Action Plan
Schneider Electric is partnering with Nvidia in pitching infrastructure to the European Commission’s (EC) AI Continent Action Plan.
The EC hopes to establish a number of AI gigafactories that will house around 100,000 next-generation AI chips, building upon the existing EuroHPC JU supercomputing effort.
The continent plan includes a €20 billion ($22bn) investment for up to five AI gigafactories across the Union and 13 smaller ones, with funding coming from government and private funding.
“AI is the defining technology of our time - the most transformative force reshaping our world,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, Nvidia. “Together with Schneider Electric, we are building AI factories: The essential infrastructure that brings AI to every company, industry, and society.”
Schneider Electric and Nvidia are together responding to the European Commission’s plan, building on a previous non-exclusive partnership. Schneider has worked with Nvidia on server and data center reference architectures since last year, as well as on digital twins through Omniverse.
"We will go build for [French AI developer] Mistral or for whoever, it could be Microsoft," Schneider Electric's EVP of the Secure Power Division, Pankaj Sharma, told DCD. "We would build the entire physical layer.
"[Across Europe] you could have AI factories, and some of them could be giga factories, each one of them then becomes an opportunity for us to go build the entire physical layer, which is the entire electrical power and cooling layer, and the software on top."
Nvidia this week claimed that as much as 3,000 AI exaflops of Blackwell compute was headed to the continent, although how much will be on data centers with Schneider Electric's reference architecture is unclear.
