Schneider Electric to buy Norway's Cognite for $3.1B in cash

Industrial AI now has a fresh benchmark price. Schneider Electric agreed to buy Norwegian industrial-data and AI firm Cognite for $3.1 billion in an all-cash deal, Bloomberg reported, and the company will be folded into Schneider's AVEVA industrial software business, with completion expected in the coming quarters.

The number worth sitting with is what Cognite is being paid for. The business booked more than $170 million in revenue in 2025 with around 800 employees and reported 36% year-on-year ARR bookings growth, which is the kind of profile a strategic buyer pays a premium for. Schneider's read, by implication, is that AVEVA's stack needs a heavier data-and-AI layer that already plugs into operational sites, and Cognite's Atlas AI platform is the thing being bought.

For Aker ASA, the Norwegian holding company that established Cognite in 2017 alongside John Markus Lervik, Geir Engdahl and Stein Danielsen, the trade is also a vindication. According to Aker's own filing carried on LSE, the parties have struck the deal on an enterprise value of $3.1 billion, Aker's share of the proceeds works out to roughly $1.48 billion, and they are calling this the largest Norwegian software and AI exit to date and one of the largest industrial software transactions in Europe.

The honest caveat is that the framing here comes from the buyer and seller themselves. The available reporting doesn't break out how much of Cognite's recent growth came from Atlas AI adoption specifically versus longer-standing industrial-data contracts, and there's nothing yet on regulatory review, retention terms for the Norwegian engineering team, or how AVEVA's existing product roadmap gets restructured around the new arrivals.

What's worth watching from here is whether the deal sets a comp for the rest of the industrial AI category. If a buyer like Schneider is willing to write a $3.1 billion all-cash check for a single platform of this size, other industrial automation incumbents will face pressure to either match the move or accelerate their own build, and a queue of European industrial-AI founders may suddenly become very interesting to strategic acquirers.