Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is a French multinational and one of the world's largest companies in energy management and industrial automation, with its EcoStruxure platform serving as an Internet-of-Things architecture that monitors and optimizes electrical systems from the grid down to individual buildings. Schneider has positioned itself at the center of the AI-and-energy story: as data-center demand strains power grids, it combines on-site power, AI-enabled automation, and real-time optimization to improve reliability and efficiency. The company also owns ETAP, the leading electrical power-system modeling and digital-twin software, and partners with NVIDIA on grid-to-chip simulation of AI data centers. For power and electrical engineers, Schneider is a dominant supplier of both the hardware and the AI-driven software layer.

Schneider is also buying its way deeper into industrial software. On October 5, 2026, it agreed to acquire PTC, the maker of Creo, Onshape and Windchill, for about $22.6 billion in cash, its largest acquisition to date, and said the deal complements its pending purchase of Cognite, agreed in June 2026. Neither deal has closed; the PTC acquisition is expected to complete by the third quarter of 2027, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval.