How this $130 billion energy management company is fueling Nvidia’s infrastructure growth

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up 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 provider for data centers, which represent about a quarter of its business, 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 research 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 technical and detailed data center blueprints, developed with Nvidia, that the company says will significantly accelerate construction timelines as well as help operators adopt AI-ready infrastructure. 

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 prove 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 about the new Schneider designs.

In something of a positive feedback loop, AI is helping to increase energy efficiency, even as it sucks up more energy. This is not just in 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 produce, what this solar rooftop can do, in real time and make sure that we consume much better at the right time, the right sort of energy. So it's a revolution of digital energy," Tricoire explained.

The proliferation of energy sources, including solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear, creates a decentralized model of energy production. This is one of the biggest changes in the market. 

"If your home 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 homes, in our daily life, in professional life, actors of this transition, which is more efficient and more sustainable."

Tricoire pointed to other geographies, like 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 follow 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 footprint, they will go even faster," said Tricoire. "There is so much innovation taking place today, and the cost curves of new technologies 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 technology 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 technologies, 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 technologies that should be or can be deployed today with a great economic return," Tricoire said.