Global automation major Schneider Electric has announced that it has partnered with NVIDIA to develop validated blueprints for designing, building and operating gigawatt-scale artificial intelligence data centres, as demand for high-performance computing infrastructure accelerates.
The company said the collaboration includes a new reference design for NVIDIA’s latest rack-scale systems, aimed at optimising power and cooling, alongside the integration of digital twin technology developed with AVEVA within the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.
The company’s announcements further strengthen Schneider Electric and NVIDIA’s existing collaboration and establish a comprehensive foundation for developing AI Factories built for gigawatt-scale and efficiency.
The newly-unveiled AI reference design is one of the first created for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks. The validated reference design covers power and cooling and is integrated with Schneider Electric’s controls reference designs. Importantly, the design addresses important infrastructure requirements and considerations for NVIDIA's latest rack-scale systems.
It enables new power distribution with increased supply voltage of 480 VAC Allows higher TCS loop supply temperature of 45°C for enhanced efficiency Supports new IT room architecture with clusters of AI racks sharing centralized networking, storage, CPU, and support racks.
This allows every NVIDIA rack-scale system to remain physically close together while allowing separate, higher voltage for the GPU racks to enable larger clusters and optimize power delivery Maximizes token performance by designing data centers to accommodate various operating points of GPU racks (both MaxP and MaxQ).
Operating at MaxQ can achieve more tokens per watt to override any power constraints and optimize computing performance through redundancy.
Overall, the reference design enables more tokens per watt when incorporating NVIDIA’s MaxQ operating point. The reference design is validated with ETAP models for electrical system design and ITD CFD models for layout and air flow
"As AI workloads scale in both size and complexity, the margin for error in data center design becomes incredibly small," said Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Secure Power & Data Centers at Schneider Electric.
"Delivering AI at scale requires tightly integrated electrical, cooling and digital architectures that can support both unprecedented performance demands while maintaining peak energy efficiency. By combining advanced software, digital twins and validated reference designs, operators can simulate and optimize infrastructure before a single rack is deployed. This approach reduces risk, accelerates deployment and ensures the efficiency and resilience needed to power the next generation of AI factories," he added.
Schneider Electric said it is also testing NVIDIA’s Nemotron AI model to support automated data centre operations, in a move towards more autonomous, software-defined infrastructure.
The announcements were made during NVIDIA’s GTC conference in San Jose, the company said.
"Gigawatt-scale AI factories demand a fundamentally new class of energy-efficient and highly predictable infrastructure,” remarked Vladimir Troy, the Vice President of AI infrastructure at NVIDIA.
"Together, NVIDIA and Schneider Electric are providing the power, cooling, and digital twin architectures needed to accelerate time-to-token for our customers worldwide," he added.
This service's advancement addresses a longstanding challenge in the data center industry: interpreting alarms at a system level to identify root causes and determine the appropriate corrective actions.
Leveraging real-time streaming IoT data across multiple systems, Schneider Electric’s agentic AI autonomously analyses, diagnoses, and recommends actions using a suite of integrated tools. Working alongside expert technicians, the technology delivers faster and more consistent issue resolution, reduces unnecessary dispatches, and enhances operational resilience.-TradeArabia News Service