Schneider Electric has two new reference designs co-created with NVIDIA

Schneider Electric, known for the digital transformation of energy management and automation, has new reference designs developed with NVIDIA that accelerate time to deployment for AI-ready infrastructure solutions.  

Today’s data centre operators rely on reference design frameworks to overcome the speed and deployment challenges of high-density, GPU-accelerated AI clusters. By providing validated, proven, and documented data centre physical infrastructure designs, Schneider Electric enables data centre operators globally to design and incorporate next-generation power and liquid cooling controls infrastructure before the newest AI infrastructure solutions even arrive, while optimising for cost, efficiency, and reliability, the company explained. 

The first reference design delivers the industry’s first and only critical framework for integrated power management and liquid cooling control systems, including Motivair by Schneider Electric liquid cooling technologies. It enables seamless management of complex AI infrastructure components, and includes interoperability with NVIDIA Mission Control — NVIDIA’s AI factory operations and orchestration software, including cluster and workload management features. 

The second reference design focuses on the deployment of AI infrastructure for AI factories of up to 142 kW per rack, specifically NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 racks, in a single data hall. Both the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack-scale solution and the NVIDIA HGX B300 NVL16 system are part of the Blackwell Ultra AI factory platform, which was introduced in March 2025. 

Created to provide a framework for the next-generation NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra architecture, the reference design includes information on four technical areas: facility power, facility cooling, IT space, and lifecycle software. 

The design has configurations for both the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards.  

“Schneider Electric is streamlining the process of designing, deploying, and operating advanced, AI infrastructure with its new reference designs,” said Jim Simonelli, Senior VP and CTO at Schneider Electric. 

“Our latest reference designs, featuring integrated power management and liquid cooling controls, are future-ready, scalable, and co-engineered with NVIDIA for real-world applications — enabling data centre operators to keep pace with surging demand for AI.”

“We are entering a new era of accelerated computing, where integrated intelligence across power, cooling and operations will redefine data centre architectures,” said Scott Wallace, Director of Data Center Engineering at NVIDIA. 

“With its latest controls reference design, Schneider Electric connects critical infrastructure data with NVIDIA Mission Control, delivering a rigourously validated blueprint that enables AI factory digital twins and empowers operators to optimise advanced accelerated computing infrastructure.” 

Controls reference design

The controls reference design connects edge devices and facility controls for energy management and liquid cooling across NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 and NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 deployments leveraging NVIDIA Mission Control. Using a “plug-and-play” architecture based on the MQTT protocol, it bridges operational technology (OT) infrastructure and information technology (IT) systems, allowing operators to, for the first time, harness data from every layer to optimise performance.

With a focus on seamless interoperability between building and AI infrastructure management software, the controls reference design establishes redundant systems for power and cooling, and introduces new guidance for measuring AI rack power profiles. Ultimately, it ensures the highest standards of uptime, reliability and peak performance for AI deployments by enabling precise, real-time management of critical power and cooling resources.

The result is an end-to-end controls system that offers: 

- A standardised format interface publishing power management and liquid cooling controls data for consumption by local applications and upstream data consumers and tools, including AI infrastructure management software, digital twins, AI/ML and other enterprise systems. 

- A controls architecture that is designed to manage redundancy across cooling and power distribution infrastructure, including coolant distribution units (CDUs) and remote power panels (RPPs), ensuring resiliency in both white and grey space environments. White space is where IT equipment is located, while grey space is where power, cooling and backup infrastructure is placed.

-  New guidance for measuring AI rack power profiles, with a focus on rack peak power and power quality monitoring. 

This reference design can also be used with Schneider Electric’s data centre reference designs for NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems. 

NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 reference design for high-density AI clusters

Schneider Electric’s reference design for NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 supports the deployment of NVIDIA GB300 NVL72- based clusters with a maximum rack density of 142 kW, such as a NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX GB300 systems. The design features a data hall that is purpose-built and optimised to host three NVIDIA GB300 NVL72- based clusters powered by up to 1,152 GPUs using liquid-to-liquid CDUs and high temperature chillers.

The reference design also includes Schneider Electric’s ETAP and EcoStruxure IT Design computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, allowing users to leverage digital twins to simulate specific power and cooling scenarios to optimise designs on unique applications. It builds upon a previous blueprint for the older NVIDIA GB200 NVL72.  

Schneider Electric has developed nine other AI reference designs for various scenarios, including  prefabricated modules, retrofit data centres, and AI infrastructure purpose-built for NVIDIA  GB200 NVL72 and NVIDIA GB300 NVL72-based clusters.