AI takes center stage at Schneider Electric Data Center Summit 2025

Schneider Electric‘s 2025 industry summit reveals the transformative impact of AI on data center infrastructure, showcasing both unprecedented challenges and strategic opportunities for the sector. The event highlighted how the convergence of generative AI, liquid cooling systems, and power management is reshaping data center requirements, while emphasizing the critical need for innovative service approaches and software integration to address the growing gap between workforce capacity and industry demand.

The big picture: Generative AI is driving rapid transformation across data center operations, creating an innovation race at both national and corporate levels while significantly increasing power density requirements.

Power challenges: Unprecedented AI growth is fundamentally changing data center energy needs, pushing facilities to evolve from mere energy consumers into actual energy stabilizers for broader infrastructure.

Cooling innovations: Motivair presented a comprehensive liquid cooling portfolio with global coverage, addressing widespread customer concerns about deployment challenges in this emerging but essential technology.

Services evolution: The industry faces a critical skills gap with demand growing at 7% while the workforce expands at just 1%, prompting companies to leverage AI for eliminating administrative tasks and enhancing personnel effectiveness.

Data center software: Effective digitization requires integrating multiple systems including DCIM, BMS, EPMS, and ITSM, while navigating complex design trade-offs to support diverse operational needs.

Channel ecosystem: Schneider Electric is taking a more proactive role in the marketplace by developing partnerships with OEMs and chipmakers, creating stronger alignment with both power and compute industry drivers.

Key differentiators: Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) offer energy procurement options that could potentially accelerate data center deployment timelines in resource-constrained environments.

• Schneider’s service approach provides clear role delineation between data engineers, data scientists, and subject-matter experts through a scalable integration model.
• The company employs a layered AI implementation view that spans assets, systems, and people for comprehensive infrastructure management.

Emerging technologies: The summit featured discussions on quantum computing, photonics, and AIOps as potential next-generation innovations that will shape future data center architectures.