A new electricity supercycle is under way

The factory floor of Schneider Electric’s plant in Conselve, Italy, hums with urgency. Workers at the power-equipment company’s facility, which is in the midst of a major expansion, are busily assembling advanced cooling systems for the data centres that underpin the development of artificial intelligence (AI). “The key is the integration of grid to chip and chip to chiller,” says Pankaj Sharma, an executive at the French company, referring to a new design it recently developed with Nvidia, an AI chip giant.