Schneider Electric and AMD Introduce Validated AI Data Centre Reference Design

Schneider Electric, an energy technology company, and AMD recently announced a jointly developed and validated reference design for the AMD Helios rackscale solution that provides a scalable blueprint for deploying high-density AI environments faster and with reduced risk and complexity. The reference design marks the first milestone of the collaboration between Schneider Electric and AMD and delivers upon the companies’ joint focus to create an easier path to AI Factory deployment.

The new reference design is developed to support high-density AI workloads on the Helios rackscale solution, which is powered by AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Pensando Vulcano NICs and the open ROCm software ecosystem. AMD Helios is designed to deliver breakthrough AI performance through advances in compute, interconnect bandwidth, memory capacity and system-level integration, allowing customers to run larger, more complex AI workloads faster while optimising power and efficiency.

As AI workloads push data centre infrastructure to unprecedented limits, reference designs provide data centre architects and operators with tested, scalable designs proven to handle new power densities, thermal requirements and operational complexity. By modeling data centre physical infrastructure performance, these pre‑validated blueprints help shorten the planning process by defining how power, cooling and IT infrastructure should be organised to build a reliable, scalable and AI‑ready data centre. The AMD Helios reference design includes information on four technical areas: facility power, facility cooling, IT space and lifecycle software.

Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Secure Power and Data Centres at Schneider Electric, said, “Today organisations require comprehensive, AI-ready reference designs that can take them from planning to deployment faster and with less risk. Through our collaboration with AMD, we're delivering an engineering-backed reference design that bridges the gap between advanced AI compute platforms, energy tech and real-world data centre implementation, enabling customers to deploy scalable, high-density AI environments with greater confidence, efficiency and speed.”

Forrest Norrod, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Centre Solutions Business Group, AMD, said, “AI infrastructure is rapidly moving to full-scale AI factories and that requires compute, networking, power and cooling to be designed together from the start. AMD Helios provides an open, rack-scale architecture built to deliver the performance, efficiency and flexibility required for next-generation AI workloads. By working with Schneider Electric to create a validated reference design, we are giving customers a practical blueprint to accelerate high-density AI deployments, reduce integration risk and scale with greater confidence and efficiency.”

The collaboration combines AMD's AI platform innovation with Schneider Electric's expertise in power, cooling and digital infrastructure to deliver an integrated approach for deploying both greenfield AI factories and high-density retrofit environments. The reference design supports modular, multi-cluster AI deployments with up to 10.4 MW of IT capacity and enables high-density AI workloads of up to 246 kW per rack. It incorporates advanced liquid cooling through Motivair by Schneider Electric's Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU)-based and hybrid air/liquid cooling systems, capable of removing up to 84 percent of generated heat.

The solution also adopts a digital-first infrastructure approach, leveraging ETAP and EcoStruxure IT Design CFD simulation tools for electrical and thermal design validation, real-time monitoring, analytics, AI-driven predictive maintenance and system-wide optimisation across power, cooling and IT infrastructure. Integrated Electrical Digital Twin capabilities further enable infrastructure modelling, analysis and performance management, while AVEVA's Unified Operations Centre provides enhanced real-time monitoring and operational visibility. Additionally, the reference design aligns with AMD Helios platform requirements, helping reduce integration complexity and deployment risks. It also delivers improved energy efficiency, with the potential to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as low as approximately 1.12 at full load. The reference design has been validated to ANSI standards for deployments in the United States, with plans to extend support to IEC standards for global implementations in the future.