Schneider Electric Buys Cognite for $3.1B to Bolster Industrial AI Capabilities

Schneider Electric SE, the French multinational energy corporation, announced today that it will acquire Cognite Holding B.V., an industrial artificial intelligence platform provider, for $3.1 billion in cash. The transaction underscores Schneider's commitment to expanding its footprint in AI-driven software and industrial data management.

Industrial AI has undergone significant transformation. Previously, these systems functioned primarily as monitoring tools, observing operations at facilities like power plants, logging performance metrics and alerting operators to maintenance needs. The technology has now matured into something far more sophisticated: autonomous systems capable of making independent decisions and executing actions without constant human intervention. Schneider Electric has determined that ownership of this capability is essential to its future strategy.

Cognite has built something rare, a truly industrial-grade AI platform

Schneider Chief Executive Olivier Blum

Blum further stated that the acquisition positions Schneider to lead "the next phase of industrial intelligence."

Cognite has engineered an AI platform designed to consolidate unstructured industrial data from multiple facility sources into a unified environment, enabling intelligent agents to process and act on that information autonomously. The company was established in 2017 and now maintains a workforce exceeding 800 employees distributed across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.

The platform integrates a unified data model with a knowledge graph architecture and agentic AI agents that perform the labor-intensive task of standardizing and operationalizing raw industrial data. Additional agents then examine this processed data and execute automated workflows based on the insights they derive.

Core Products

Two primary offerings form the backbone of Cognite's solution. Data Fusion serves as the data infrastructure layer, managing the complex process of contextualizing and operationalizing industrial data streams. Atlas AI comprises the agentic layer responsible for automating operational tasks and accelerating decision cycles. In practical terms, an agent operating within this system could identify a deteriorating pump, procure necessary replacement components, arrange the maintenance appointment, and present the plan for human approval.

Schneider intends to integrate these offerings into its Aveva CONNECT platform. Aveva, a software division headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., was previously acquired by Schneider and specializes in the design, operation and optimization of industrial infrastructure.

Cognite's AI solutions have already seen deployment across power generation, oil and gas, and manufacturing sectors. These industries possess vast repositories of historical data accumulated over many decades, yet this information has traditionally remained underutilized. Cognite's agentic AI systems unlock the value embedded in these datasets, driving the company's substantial expansion trajectory since inception.

During 2025, Cognite generated revenue surpassing $170 million, with recurring bookings climbing 36 percent. The sale will yield substantial returns for Cognite's investors. Aker, the Norwegian investment firm that co-founded the company in 2017, stands to receive approximately $1.48 billion in proceeds from the transaction, according to Bloomberg.

The acquisition reflects intensifying momentum around industrial AI applications, particularly across Europe, where manufacturing enterprises are pursuing efficiency gains and waste reduction. Blum emphasized that European nations are also prioritizing transitions toward renewable energy sources and decreasing dependence on Russian petroleum and natural gas supplies, transitions that demand intelligent systems.

Such intelligence depends fundamentally on data access, and extracting value from data requires AI technologies. Schneider already supplies the industrial hardware infrastructure, Blum explained, and Cognite furnishes the software layer necessary to enhance that hardware's capabilities.

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. This is what industrial intelligence looks like at scale.

Olivier Blum

Schneider Electric indicated that the transaction requires regulatory clearance before completion, with the company projecting closure during the "coming quarters."