GTC Paris Schneider Electric and Nvidia are jointly developing cooling, management, and control systems for AI datacenters in support of the EU’s AI action plan, with Schneider detailing support for racks with 1 MW loads.
The “global” agreement was announced at Nvidia’s GTC Paris event amid growing demand for sustainable, AI-ready kit.
The pair also see an opportunity in the European Commission’s AI Continent Action Plan, an initiative to set up at least 13 AI factories – complete ecosystems for developing AI models – across Europe, as well as establishing up to five “AI gigafactories.”
Schneider is a major supplier of electrical gear, cooling systems, and even the racks themselves for all those bit barns, while Nvidia’s GPU accelerators for AI are increasingly coming pre-configured as rack-scale hardware.
“Together, we’ve seen tremendous success in deploying next-generation power and liquid cooling solutions, purpose-built for AI datacenters,” said Schneider chief exec Olivier Blum in a canned remark.
In light of the alliance, Schneider unveiled additions to its EcoStruxure portfolio that are aimed increasingly power-dense AI clusters.
This includes pre-fabricated, scalable datacenter pods designed for rapid deployment of high-density workloads. The Prefabricated Modular EcoStruxure Pod Data Center is engineered to order and delivered pre-assembled, supporting high-density racks up to 1 MW and beyond.
Google recently said it too is planning for 1 MW racks of IT hardware to support AI workloads.
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Schneider also announced NetShelter SX Advanced Enclosures, which feature taller, deeper, and stronger racks to support heavier systems with more cabling and infrastructure, plus NetShelter Rack PDU Advanced power distribution units, updated for the high power needs of modern AI servers.
NetShelter Open Architecture is a rack design “inspired” by the Open Compute Project (OCP), available as a configure-to-order system that can support Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72.
These are all backed by Schneider’s power and cooling distribution systems, including in-rack direct-to-chip liquid cooling tech by Motivair, which the firm acquired last year.
According to Schneider, the datacenter market is shifting toward more prefabricated solutions. It told The Register previously that if an operator is building from scratch, the cost savings can be up to 30 percent, and infrastructure can be deployed in a shorter time in order to start earning or selling capacity earlier. ®
