AVEVA, ETAP, and Schneider Electric announced that they had joined the Alliance for OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description). The companies are helping to shape the future of interoperable digital twins and simulation-ready (SimReady) 3D assets with industry pioneers like NVIDIA, Pixar, Adobe, and Autodesk.
The statement was made during Schneider Electric’s Innovation Summit North America in Las Vegas, which brought together over 2,500 industry innovators and business executives to advance workable solutions for a more intelligent, economical, and resilient energy future.
The announcement reaffirms the companies’ dedication to developing open standards for Gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure, collaborative design, and industrial simulation. For the purpose of creating virtual worlds and promoting industrial digitalization, OpenUSD is a high-performance, extensible framework and ecosystem that facilitates smooth interchange across software tools and data formats.
By joining the Alliance, Schneider Electric, AVEVA, and ETAP demonstrate their increased alignment with NVIDIA’s vision for real-time, scalable, and physically accurate digital twin environments designed to mimic future buildings, manufacturing facilities, data centers, and AI infrastructure systems.
NVIDIA Omniverse libraries are being quickly adopted by organizations to create digital twin solutions for modeling projects, digitizing procedures, and designing systems to the highest performance, sustainability, and energy efficiency standards.
Schneider Electric, AVEVA and ETAP joining the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) marks a pivotal moment in the companies’ partnership with NVIDIA and builds upon milestones the companies have shared throughout the years to accelerate digital twin and AI factory development.
The companies are co-developing reference architectures, integrated infrastructure and software solutions that will power and cool the next generation of AI factories, and working on projects that leverage NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to simulate and improve energy efficiency in real-world environments.
Advancing open standards for industrial simulation, collaborative design, and AI infrastructure systems
By adopting OpenUSD as a shared standard, the companies are working closely with NVIDIA to unlock new possibilities for:
- SimReady Asset Development: Creating interoperable, simulation-ready models of physical infrastructure components, like power and cooling systems, that can be orchestrated within industrial digital twins that leverage NVIDIA Omniverse libraries.
- Digital Twin Collaboration: Enabling unified views of complex systems such as data centers, energy grids, and industrial facilities that are integrated with Schneider Electric’s platforms like EcoStruxure, AVEVA and ETAP. The three companies’ multi-domain expertise across buildings, data centers, factories, plants, grids, and infrastructure offers advanced digital twin simulations for an array of industries.
- Accelerated AI Infrastructure Deployment: Leveraging the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to codesign gigawatt-scale AI factories with reduced risk and faster time-to-market.
Applications with integrated NVIDIA Omniverse libraries are used in conjunction with Schneider Electric’s SimReady assets to enable physically realistic, detailed simulations across industries and speed up the development of digital twins.
Data center operators are improving AI factory design and operations, while manufacturers are streamlining manufacturing lines. The use of digital twins and OpenUSD is promoting increased resilience, sustainability, and energy efficiency.
For instance, data center operators can model and control physical infrastructure systems that mimic power distribution, ventilation, and thermal behavior to maximize cooling efficiency and dependability by utilizing AI manufacturing digital twins.
Leadership Comments
“OpenUSD is more than a file format, it’s a virtual bridge between industries,” said Jim Simonelli, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Data Centers at Schneider Electric. “Joining the Alliance allows us to contribute to a shared digital language that empowers collaboration, simulation, and innovation across the AI ecosystem. It’s a natural extension of our work with NVIDIA, allowing us to build AI infrastructure that’s not only powerful, but intelligent, sustainable, and future-ready.”
“To efficiently design and operate complex systems like AI factories, industries need a robust, simulation-ready foundation,” said Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. “Schneider Electric’s expertise in energy management, hardware and software, combined with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, will accelerate the creation of the AI factories and intelligent grids of the future, paving the way for a new era of AI-driven efficiency and sustainability.”
Continued innovation, partnership, and impact
At GTC DC, Schneider Electric was named as a power, cooling, and energy technology partner contributing to the NVIDIA AI factory Research Center in Manassas, Virginia. Powered by the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, the center was built to support breakthroughs in generative AI, scientific computing and advanced manufacturing and to serve as a foundation for the Omniverse DSX Blueprint for gigascale AI factories. In March 2025, ETAP by Schneider Electric unveiled a cutting-edge digital twin that can accurately design and simulate the power needs of AI factories.
