At its Innovation Summit in Las Vegas, Schneider Electric, along with AVEVA and ETAP, announced their joining the Alliance for OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description). With this move, the three companies join industry pioneers like NVIDIA, Pixar, Adobe, and Autodesk to accelerate interoperability and open standards for next-generation digital twins and 3D models.
The collaboration aims to strengthen software interoperability and promote open standards for industrial simulation, collaborative design, and AI infrastructure systems. The companies’ software portfolios already aid the creation of digital twins , improving building design, sustainability, and equipment optimization in sectors such as buildings, energy grids, and AI factories.
OpenUSD is a high-performance, extensible framework and ecosystem that enables seamless interoperability between software tools and data types for building virtual worlds and advancing industrial digitalization.
OpenUSD is considered a powerful and extensible framework that enables seamless interoperability between different software tools and data types.
“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.”
Joining the Alliance signals Schneider Electric, AVEVA and ETAP’s deepened alignment with NVIDIA’s vision for scalable, physically accurate and real-time digital twin environments, engineered to simulate buildings, manufacturing factories, data centers, and AI infrastructure systems of the future. Organizations are rapidly adopting NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to develop digital twin solutions to model projects, digitalize processes and design systems to the highest standards of performance, sustainability and energy efficiency.
Promoting AI and infrastructure development
The joint effort is aimed at creating:
- 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.
- 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.
