Schneider Electric is buying Cognite, a Norwegian-founded industrial AI company, for $3.1bn in cash. The French group wants software that can make factories and power grids think for themselves.
Schneider Electric said on June 30, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire all of Cognite in an all-cash deal worth $3.1bn. Cognite builds software that pulls messy industrial data into one place and lets AI act on it. Schneider plans to fold the company into Aveva, its own industrial software arm.
The purchase tracks a shift in what industrial AI does. For years it simply described life inside a plant, flagging a fault or charting output. Now it increasingly decides and acts. Schneider wants to own that move. “Cognite has built something rare, a truly industrial grade AI platform,” chief executive Olivier Blum said. He framed the deal as a way to put Schneider “at the centre of the next phase of industrial intelligence.”
What Cognite brings
A group of founders started Cognite in 2017. The company now employs more than 800 people across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. Its platform pairs a unified data model and a knowledge graph with newer agentic AI tools. In plain terms, it cleans and connects the data pouring off machines. AI agents then run analysis and automate workflows on top of it.
Two products sit at the core. Data Fusion handles the messy job of modelling and contextualising engineering and operational data. Atlas AI adds the generative and agentic layer that automates tasks and speeds up decisions. On a factory floor, that can mean an agent spotting a failing pump, ordering the part, and scheduling the repair, with a human signing off. Schneider will bind both products to Aveva’s CONNECT platform, the Cambridge-based software unit it already owns. It wants one system to span the design, operation, and optimisation of industrial assets.
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Cognite has aimed its tools at asset-heavy industries such as oil and gas, power generation, and manufacturing. These sectors sit on decades of data they have rarely used well. The pitch turns that backlog into something an AI agent can read and act on. The same market draws data-software firms such as Palantir, which makes the race for the industrial data layer a crowded one.
The business grows quickly. Revenue passed $170mn in 2025, and recurring bookings rose 36 per cent. Cognite’s owners do well from the sale. Norway’s Aker, the investment firm that helped start the company in 2017, expects about $1.48bn in cash proceeds, including the settlement of a convertible loan, according to Bloomberg.
A European bet on the factory floor
The deal lands in the middle of a European push. Manufacturers across the region keep adding AI to their plants to lift efficiency and cut waste. Schneider’s rival Siemens chases the same shop-floor market. For Europe, industrial AI remains one of the few areas where the continent still holds an edge over the United States and China. Firms race to defend it.
Blum tied the logic back to energy. The energy transition demands intelligence, he argued, intelligence demands data, and unlocking that data demands AI. Schneider sells the hardware that runs the physical world. Cognite gives it the software to make that hardware smarter.
Schneider also counts as a quiet winner of the wider AI boom. Its shares have climbed 26 per cent in a year to record highs, as investors back the companies that supply the boom’s plumbing. It sells energy and cooling kit to the data centres that train and run AI models. That business grows fast, including in markets such as India.
Buying the software is the next step. Rather than build an industrial AI platform from scratch, Schneider does what many large firms now do, and snaps up a company that already has one. France has pushed hard to grow its own AI sector, from startups to state spending. Schneider ranks as the country’s fourth-largest company by value, worth about €165bn.
The catch
The deal has not closed yet. It still needs regulatory clearance, and the companies expect it to complete in the coming quarters. Industrial software remains a crowded field, and European software investors keep a close watch on which platforms win. Schneider is betting that whoever controls the data layer will control the factory.
If the bet works, Schneider gets to sell both the hardware and the brain that runs it. “We give them the ability to think, adapt, and act,” Blum said of the company’s systems. The promise is large. The proof will come on real factory floors, once the deal closes and the slow work of folding Cognite into Aveva begins.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
