Schneider Electric and AMD unveil reference design for 246kW AI racks

Announced on July 23, the design marks the first milestone in a collaboration between the two companies and provides a blueprint for organisations building AI factories, combining AMD’s compute platform with Schneider Electric’s power, cooling and digital infrastructure expertise.

The reference design supports AI racks of up to 246kW and modular AI clusters scaling to 10.4MW of IT load, addressing the power density and thermal demands of large AI deployments. It also covers facility power, facility cooling, IT space and lifecycle software.

Manish Kumar, EVP, Secure Power & Data Centers at Schneider Electric, said organisations now need comprehensive, AI-ready reference designs to move from planning to deployment more quickly and with less risk.

“Through our collaboration with AMD, we’re delivering an engineering-backed reference design that bridges the gap between advanced AI compute platforms, energy tech, and real-world data center implementation, enabling customers to deploy scalable, high-density AI environments with greater confidence, efficiency, and speed,” Kumar said.

The design is built around AMD’s Helios rackscale solution, powered by AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, sixth-generation AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Pensando Vulcano NICs and the ROCm software ecosystem.

Forrest Norrod, EVP and GM of the Data Center Solutions Business Group at AMD, said AI infrastructure is moving rapidly towards full-scale AI factories, requiring compute, networking, power and cooling to be designed together from the outset.

“AMD Helios provides an open, rack-scale architecture built to deliver the performance, efficiency and flexibility required for next-generation AI workloads,” Norrod said. “By working with Schneider Electric to create a validated reference design, we are giving customers a practical blueprint to accelerate high-density AI deployments, reduce integration risk and scale with greater confidence and efficiency.”

On the cooling side, the reference design incorporates Motivair by Schneider Electric CDU-based and hybrid air/liquid systems capable of removing up to 84% of heat generated. Electrical and thermal design has been validated using ETAP and EcoStruxure IT Design CFD simulation tools, alongside an Electrical Digital Twin for modelling infrastructure performance and support from AVEVA’s Unified Operations Center for monitoring.

Schneider Electric said the approach can help deployments achieve a PUE as low as approximately 1.12 at full load.

The reference design has been validated to ANSI standards for deployments in the US, with the companies planning to extend the framework to support IEC standards for international markets.

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