Schneider Electric drops $22.6B on PTC as datacenter boom rains money on infra companies

Schneider Electric's market cap has more than doubled in the past four years as the AI boom has driven unprecedented demand for datacenter power and cooling infrastructure.

Now the French multinational is cashing in on its good fortunes to cement its place as a key provider of industrial power and datacenter infrastructure with the $22.6 billion acquisition of American industrial software company PTC.

Founded in 1985, PTC made a name for itself developing software for computer-aided design, plus lifecycle management tools for industrial products and applications.

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The all-cash deal, announced on Monday, positions Schneider Electric to capitalize on the proliferation of datacenters used to train and serve AI models at scale.

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Since ChatGPT kicked off the AI arms race in late 2022, datacenter design and power requirements have changed considerably. Forty-kilowatt air-cooled racks have given way to 250kW liquid-cooled systems that need much denser power delivery and thermal management systems, all of which need to work together.

In light of the growing complexity and supply chain challenges facing datacenter deployments, Schneider has made several strategic acquisitions which expanded its role in bit barn development.

In late 2024, not long after Nvidia unveiled its first all-liquid-cooled rack designs, Schneider invested roughly $850 million on a 75 percent stake in Motivair, one of the leading producers of cold plates, rack manifolds, coolant distribution units (CDUs) and rear-door heat exchangers required to support the widespread adoption of liquid-cooled servers. The company is expected to acquire the remainder of Motivair sometime in 2028.

As Schneider's role in the datacenter has grown, users of its kit have more products to manage across their lifecycles. Buying PTC expands Schneider's lifecycle management offerings and introduces key design capabilities to its offerings.

PTC isn't Schneider's only datacenter-centric acquisition this year. Back in June, the company paid $3.1bn for industrial data operations vendor Cognite.

Speaking to investors on Monday, Schneider CEO Olivier Blum suggested that owning PTC and Cognite would enable the company to inject software-defined automation into power systems early in their development, improving their efficiency in the process. Datacenters are one of Schneider's initial targets.

"We believe that at the design stage, it is super important that you can help your customer to design both product, machine, processes and energy system. This is where we see CAD engineering as a very critical part of the portfolio," Blum said, according to a transcript of his remarks to investors.

That's assuming of course that Schneider doesn't run into any regulatory hurdles along the way. The deal, Schneider's largest ever, isn't expected to close until late next year. ®