In this articleNVDA your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTwatch now15:1915:19perty Play: Schneider Electric's chairman on the energy revolutionCNBC perty PlayA version of this article first appeared in the CNBC perty Play with Diana Olick.
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to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.Despite its name, Schneider Electric does not generate electricity.
It is an energy management company, mixing electrification and digitization together so customers know exactly where their energy is consumed and can optimize their energy usage in real time.
It's the largest energy management vider for data centers, which represent a quarter of its , and it's working with chipmaker and Wall Street powerhouse Nvidia.
Schneider announced in June it would collaborate with Nvidia to serve the growing demand for sustainable, AI-ready infrastructure.
This was a re and development partnership for power, cooling, controlling and high-density rack systems to enable the next generation of AI factories across Europe and eventually beyond.
Then last month, Schneider announced new, highly nical and detailed data center blues, developed with Nvidia, that the company says will significantly accelerate construction timelines as well as help operators adopt AI-ready infrastructure.
Get perty Play directly to your inboxCNBC's perty Play with Diana Olick covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, dered weekly to your inbox.
here to get access today.The first part of that is integrated power management and liquid cooling control systems. The second is a framework for the development of Nvidia's new Blackwell chips.
"We make sure, at every generation they come out with, that the solution we put together will minimize the consumption of energy to power their installations," said Jean-Pascal Tricoire, chairman of Schneider Electric.
"Those chips, which are powering AI or enabling AI, are chips which are consuming a lot of energy, and you need to cool them directly on the chip by bringing liquid directly on the chip."The partnership could ve extremely lucrative, especially given Nvidia's recent $100 billion investment in OpenAI.
More data centers will mean more demand not just for energy but energy management.
"We are entering a new era of accelerated computing, where integrated intelligence across power, cooling and operations will redefine data center architectures," said Scott Wallace, director of data center engineering at Nvidia, in a release the new Schneider designs.In something of a positive back loop, AI is helping to increase energy efficiency, even as it sucks up more energy.
This is not data centers, but in all of the built environment.
"To make it very simple, AI can help gain in efficiency four times more than it consumes, at least four to nine times more," said Tricoire.Power consumption was already being digitized, but it had been difficult to optimize this at scale.
"Today, for the first time, we've got computing engines that can integrate all the complexity of what you do, what I do, what this data center is doing, what the grid can power, what this power plant can duce, what this solar rooftop can do, in real time and make sure that we consume much better at the right time, the right of energy.
So it's a revolution of digital energy," Tricoire explained.The liferation of energy sources, including solar, wind, geothermal and nu, creates a decentralized model of energy duction.
This is one of the biggest changes in the market.
"If your is not consuming any more electricity, because you are autonomous with solar batteries, because you recharge your electric vehicle, then that means you have freed enough power to power a fraction of this data center which is close to you," Tricoire said.
"All of us can become, in our enterprises, in our s, in our daily life, in fessional life, actors of this transition, which is more efficient and more sustainable."Tricoire pointed to other geographies, Europe, India and China, that are turning to electrification because of a lack of fossil fuels.
For them, it is the only way to be more competitive. He said that will lead to further innovation in the sector and push American companies to suit — even despite political headwinds in the U.S.
for renewable energy. "Companies are very pragmatic. If a solution makes money, they will go for it, right? And if, on top of it, it's better for their foot, they will go even faster," said Tricoire.
"There is so much innovation taking place today, and the cost curves of new nologies are going down so fast, that companies are adopting new ways of doing things."Tricoire has been with the company nearly 40 years and says he has never seen the type of dramatic and swift maturity and growth in energy nology that he's seeing right now."I think people are completely underestimating the revolution which will happen in the field of energy in the two decades to come," said Tricoire, adding that the combination of electrification nologies, plus digitization, augmented to a whole new level by AI, creates a number of possibilities that we've never seen before.
"And the great news is that it's not things that should be deployed in 10 years' time, 20 years' time.
Those are nologies that should be or can be deployed today with a great economic return," Tricoire said.