World’s first industrial AI cloud plant will boost European manufacturing

Nvidia has announced plans to build the world’s first industrial AI cloud in Germany to support industrial AI workloads for European manufacturers. The factory will include 10,000 GPUs (graphics processors) and will allow European industrial leaders to accelerate manufacturing applications from design, engineering and simulation, to digital twins and robotics.

Nvidia say that the investment – which it hasn’t quantified – will accelerate AI development and adoption for European manufacturers in anticipation of AI gigafactories.

“In the era of AI, every manufacturer needs two factories: one for making things, and one for creating the intelligence that powers them,” said Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, when he announced the plans at an event in Paris. “By building Europe’s first industrial AI infrastructure, we’re enabling the region’s leading industrial companies to advance simulation-first, AI-driven manufacturing.

“Every industrial revolution begins with infrastructure,” he added. “AI is the essential infrastructure of our time, just as electricity and the Internet once were. With bold leadership from Europe’s governments and industries, AI will drive transformative innovation and prosperity for generations to come.”

Nvidia is also establishing and expanding AI technology centres in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain and Finland. These centres will help to develop the AI workforce.

In the UK, Nvidia is also collaborating with Nebius and Nscale to unlock advanced AI capabilities for businesses of all sizes. In a first phase, they will deploy 14,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to power new data centres, making scalable, secure AI infrastructure widely accessible across the UK.

According to Peter Kyle, the UK’s secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Nvidia’s expanded UK activities “will be vital in helping us to deliver on our AI ambitions, and their partnership in building the capabilities that will transform our AI growth zones into engines of opportunity… Just as coal and electricity once defined our past, AI is defining our future.”

Nvidia’s European AI factory will follow the framework in its Omniverse Blueprint for AI factory design and operations. As part of this blueprint, Cadence’s Reality Digital Twin Platform will be used to simulate and optimise the entire AI factory in a physically accurate virtual environment, allowing engineers to build a smarter, more reliable facility.

The factory will incorporate Nvidia technologies including its DGX B200 systems and RTX Pro Servers, and will run Nvidia’s Cuda-X libraries, RTX and Omniverse-accelerated workloads.

In a separate development, Nvidia has expanded its partnership with Siemens to accelerate the next era of industrial AI and digitalisation, and to enable factories of the future. The combination of Siemens’ strengths in software and industrial automation, with Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing will allow industrial companies to use AI-powered technologies for next-generation factory automation, from product design to execution. This will enable them to make more confident decisions using real-time, data-driven insights, enhance their operational efficiencies, and improve collaboration.

A new line of rugged Siemens industrial PCs, certified for Nvidia GPUs, will drive powerful AI-supported industrial computing, operating 24/7. They will enable complex industrial automation tasks – from AI-based robotics to quality inspection and predictive maintenance – achieving a 25x acceleration in AI execution.

At the Paris event, Nvidia gave examples of how European manufacturers are transforming their end-to-end product lifecycles – from simulated product design and factory planning, to AI-driven operations and logistics – using Nvidia-accelerated applications from software suppliers including Ansys, Cadence and Siemens:

• Schaeffler is using Nvidia’s physical AI stack for factory planning, training humanlike robotic skills, and scaling AI-powered automation across its 100+ manufacturing plants. By tapping into Nvidia’s Omniverse ecosystem using Siemens applications, Schaeffler is creating digital twins of its facilities. It is also using Microsoft’s Azure industrial cloud and Wandelbots’ Nova platform, which optimises the simulation, integration and maintenance of robots. Initial use cases are moving towards maturity, with aim of accelerating deployments by cutting integration costs.

• BMW is building digital twins of its production facilities using Nvidia’s Omniverse libraries. The plant-scale twins allow BMW production planning teams collaborate in real time, optimise the layout and design of complex manufacturing systems, and develop autonomous robot and vision AI applications before real-world deployment. BMW and Siemens are also accelerating the simulation of vehicle aerodynamics while reducing energy consumption and costs.

• Mercedes-Benz is using Omniverse to design and optimise factory assembly lines virtually, cutting downtime and improving efficiency across its factories worldwide.

• Maserati is using Siemens systems powered by Omniverse APIs to visualise airflows over car bodies and improve its manufacturing processes.

• Ansys is integrating Omniverse into its Ansys Fluent fluid simulation software, and into its AVxcelerate sensors to improve scene building and visualisation for autonomous vehicle simulations. Volvo Cars used Ansys Fluent running on Nvidia GPUs to accelerate fluid simulations by 2.5x for its EX90 electric vehicle.

Source: https://drivesncontrols.com/worlds-first-industrial-ai-cloud-plant-will-boost-european-manufacturing/