Schneider Electric buys Cognite for $3.1bn in industrial AI bet

Schneider Electric has agreed to acquire Cognite, a Norwegian industrial AI software company, in an all-cash deal worth $3.1 billion, making it the largest software exit in Norway’s history. The French energy technology group will acquire 100% of Cognite’s share capital, with completion of the transaction expected in the coming quarters.

Schneider intends to integrate Cognite’s data foundation into AVEVA, its industrial software subsidiary, with Cognite reporting within the Industrial Automation division upon completion. Cognite’s cloud-native platform combines a unified industrial data model with agentic AI capabilities, enabling customers to operationalise AI directly within plant operations, asset management and engineering workflows.

What Cognite brings to the table

Founded in Oslo in 2017 as a spinout from Norwegian industrial conglomerate Aker ASA, Cognite spent nearly a decade solving a problem that most industrial operators quietly acknowledge but rarely discuss openly: the majority of operational data generated by factories, power grids, energy assets and infrastructure systems sits in silos, poorly labelled and largely unusable by AI.

Cognite’s technology enables the integration and contextualisation of complex industrial data through a unified data model and knowledge graph, supporting advanced analytics and AI-driven applications for asset-intensive industries. That knowledge graph is the critical differentiator. Without it, even the most sophisticated AI model is working blind — it may have compute and capability, but no coherent understanding of what the data actually represents or how different assets relate to one another.

Cognite generated more than $170 million in revenue in 2025 and employs around 800 people worldwide. The year was marked by 36% growth in ARR bookings and rapid adoption of the Atlas AI platform. Its tools have been deployed across power generation, oil and gas, and manufacturing, sectors that sit on decades of accumulated operational data that has historically resisted meaningful AI application.

Schneider CEO Olivier Blum commented: “Cognite has built something rare, a truly industrial grade AI platform that turns the complexity of operational data into a competitive advantage,” he said in the announcement.

“By bringing Cognite into Schneider Electric and AVEVA, we unite the world’s most comprehensive energy management and automation infrastructure with the software and AI capabilities to make it natively intelligent. Together, we go beyond connecting systems. We give them the ability to think, adapt, and act.”

The AVEVA play and why timing matters

AVEVA, acquired by Schneider in 2023 and headquartered in Cambridge, has long been respected for its engineering design and operational software. Its current technology excels at traditional predictive analytics, but agentic, operational industrial AI requires the specialised data contextualisation layer that Cognite has been building for the last decade. This acquisition closes that gap directly.

The timing is very much relevant – PwC’s 2026 mid-year industrials deal outlook put total industrial manufacturing M&A at $173 billion over the past year, a 28% increase on the prior year, with mega-deals above $5 billion now accounting for 56% of deal value. Rivals are not standing still, Eaton and Rockwell Automation are both making acquisitions in adjacent spaces, and Siemens has been cited as ahead on generative AI depth within industrial software.

Schneider’s shares have risen 26% over the past year to record levels, supported by investor interest in companies tied to the AI infrastructure buildout. Aker expects approximately $1.48 billion in cash proceeds from the transaction, including settlement of an outstanding convertible loan.

A pattern of strategic accumulation at Schneider

The Cognite deal sits within a broader pattern of aggressive positioning across the AI infrastructure stack.

Schneider and Nvidia have already extended their data centre partnership to develop validated blueprints for gigawatt-scale AI Factories, including a new Vera Rubin reference design validating power and cooling for Nvidia’s latest rack-scale architectures, alongside integration of digital twin capabilities within the Nvidia Omniverse DSX Blueprint ecosystem.

The company has also announced a strategic partnership with Foxconn to scale next-generation AI data centres, combining Foxconn’s expertise in advanced compute platforms and global manufacturing with Schneider’s leadership in power systems, cooling and energy management.

On the cooling side, Schneider’s acquisition of Motivair has given it a liquid cooling portfolio ranging from 105kW to 2.5MW CDU capacity, directly targeting the thermal demands of high-density GPU clusters. At Datacloud Global Congress 2026, Schneider demonstrated how organisations can deploy AI-ready infrastructure responsibly through next-generation architectures, liquid cooling, intelligent software and digital services.

Taken together, Cognite completes a picture that Schneider has been assembling methodically: hardware, cooling, digital twin, and now the AI data foundation layer. The company is not positioning itself as a supplier to the AI industrial stack. It is positioning itself as the stack.

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