Schneider Electric has agreed to acquire Cognite, a Norwegian company whose software organizes data streaming off factory floors, for $3.1 billion in cash, the French energy-management group said. The deal is the latest and largest sign that European manufacturers are paying up for artificial-intelligence software as they modernize aging plants.
Cognite is privately held, and Schneider will buy all of its shares from Norway’s Aker ASA and other investors, the companies said. Schneider plans to fold the business into Aveva, the industrial-software unit it acquired three years ago, creating a division that spans plant design, operations data and the AI tools built on top of both. Executives described the combination as a one-stop shop for manufacturers trying to make sense of their own factories.
Cognite was founded in 2016 as a spin-off of Aker, the Norwegian oil and industrial group, and its Data Fusion platform has become a standard tool in energy, mining and manufacturing for turning sensor data into a searchable model of an entire facility. Its customers include oil majors, utilities and chemical producers, and its technology has been used to predict equipment failures, cut unplanned downtime and plan maintenance around real operating conditions rather than fixed schedules.
The purchase price values Cognite well above the roughly $1.6 billion valuation it carried in a 2021 funding round, reflecting how much industrial AI has appreciated in the eyes of buyers. Schneider, whose core business is electrical equipment for buildings and factories, has been pushing software and services as a source of growth, and the company has said it wants a larger share of the money its customers spend on digitalizing operations. Software now accounts for a growing slice of its revenue.
The logic of the deal is straightforward. Factories generate enormous volumes of data that most operators never use, and the companies that can turn that data into decisions stand to win a growing share of industrial spending. Cognite gives Schneider a mature platform and a base of customers; Aveva gives Cognite a distribution network reaching thousands of plants that Schneider already serves. The two businesses had already started integrating their offerings before the acquisition was announced.
European manufacturers are under particular pressure to act. Energy costs remain high relative to the United States and Asia, labor is scarce and expensive, and competition from Chinese producers has squeezed margins in machinery, chemicals and automotive supply. Applying AI to existing plants is cheaper than building new ones, and executives increasingly treat software as the fastest way to improve efficiency without adding headcount or capacity.
Rivals are moving in the same direction. Siemens, Schneider’s biggest European competitor, has built its own industrial AI stack around its Digital Industries business and has struck a series of partnerships with software firms. The race has intensified as large U.S. technology companies push industrial customers to run their data through general-purpose cloud AI tools, a route that some plant operators find cheaper in the short term but harder to integrate with legacy equipment.
Analysts said the deal makes strategic sense but carries execution risk. Integrating two large software businesses is hard, and Schneider’s acquisition of Aveva took years to produce visible results. The company’s purchase of Cognite comes with a similar promise: that combining the platform with Aveva’s customer base will unlock faster growth than either business could achieve alone. Cognite has grown steadily without ever becoming a household name. It has expanded from its oil-and-gas roots into metals, chemicals and utilities, and its recurring software revenue has climbed each year, though the company has been tight-lipped about profitability. Norwegian tech executives said the sale price validates a decade of patient building in a country better known for oil and shipping than for software exits.
Investors will be watching the company’s software margins for signs that the promise is being kept.
Aker, which has held a majority stake since Cognite’s founding, has been reducing its exposure to the software business as it refocuses on its core oil and gas operations. The sale gives Aker a substantial cash return on an investment made a decade ago, and it frees Cognite from the constraints of being a subsidiary of a Norwegian industrial group with its own priorities.
Schneider said it expects the transaction to close later this year, subject to regulatory approval. Until then, Cognite continues to operate independently, and its customers will be watching to see whether the platform they rely on changes hands as smoothly as the press releases suggest. The acquisition also signals how the industrial software market is consolidating. A decade ago, plant operators chose between large suites from companies like Siemens and Schneider, or point solutions from smaller vendors. The rise of AI has compressed that market, because the models that make factory data useful need scale, distribution and customer relationships that only large groups can provide. Smaller vendors are increasingly choosing to sell rather than compete.
For European manufacturers, the deal is a measure of how much their industrial data has come to be worth.
