French multinational energy giant Schneider Electric SE said today it’s buying an industrial artificial intelligence company called Cognite Holding B.V. in a $3.1 billion all-cash deal, with an eye to strengthening its AI software and industrial data business.

The deal highlights the evolving nature of industrial AI, which for years simply followed what was happening industrial facilities such as power plants, recording outputs and flagging problems that required maintenance. Nowadays, industrial AI is becoming far more autonomous, able to make decisions and take actions on its own, and Schneider has decided it needs to own that.

“Cognite has built something rare, a truly industrial-grade AI platform,” said Schneider Chief Executive Olivier Blum. He said the acquisition will help put his company at the center of “the next phase of industrial intelligence.”

The company has developed AI software that pulls messy industrial data from across facilities into one place, so that intelligent agents can act on it autonomously. It was founded in 2017 and has grown to employ more than 800 staff across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Its platform marries a unified data model and knowledge graph with agentic AI agents that help to clean and connect the data that pours out of industrial machines. Other agents can then analyze that data and automate workflows based on what it tells them.

There are two key products that do this. Data Fusion is the data infrastructure that handles the messy work of contextualizing and operationalizing industrial data. Then Atlas AI provides the agentic layer that automates tasks and speeds up decision-making. What this means is that an agent might be able to spot a failing pump, order the parts required to fix it, and then schedule the repair, with a human signing off on that.

Schneider said it will integrate these products with the Aveva CONNECT platform. Aveva is a Cambridge, U.K.-based software unit previously acquired by the energy giant that’s focused on the design, operation and optimization of industrial assets.

Cognite’s AI tools have already been deployed in industries such as power generation, oil and gas and manufacturing. These sectors sit on masses of data that has been accumulated over decades but rarely put to much good use. Cognite’s AI agents finally change that, which explains why it has grown so much since its founding.

In 2025, its revenue exceeded $170 million, with recurring bookings increasing by 36%. Cognite’s backers will profit immensely from the sale. For instance, the Norwegian investment firm Aker, which helped to found the company back in 2017, is expecting to receive around $1.48 billion in cash from the sale, Bloomberg reported.

The deal comes at a time of growing interest in industrial AI, especially in Europe, where manufacturers are striving to increase their efficiency and reduce waste. Blum said Europe is also keen to switch to cleaner forms of energy and reduce its reliance on Russian oil and gas, and that transition requires intelligence.

In turn, intelligence needs data, and to unlock that data, AI is required too. Schneider, he said, already sells the hardware that powers industry, and Cognite gives it the software needed to make that hardware smarter.

“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,” Blum said. “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.”

Schneider said the transaction is subject to regulatory approval, but it expects the deal to close in the “coming quarters.”

Image: Cognite