We met Morten Wierod, CEO of the $33-billion electrification and automation group ABB, at a brand new factory the company has set up in Bengaluru. It will focus on a new product category—UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems for data centers. “We see a very large pipeline now for data centers in India,” Wierod tells us. ABB’s next technology leap is being built around data centers and AI. A growing part of that work is also being shaped in India, where the Swedish-Swiss group has built large engineering, R&D and manufacturing capabilities that support both local and global customers. AI is driving a massive expansion in computing infrastructure, and that is pushing power demand to new levels. The data center business was less than 1% of ABB’s global revenue in 2019, today it is 9%. “It’s the fastest growing segment for us, growing almost 35% every year,” Wierod says. While UPS’ sit next to the server racks inside a data centre, ABB’s bigger business comes from the electrical infrastructure that sits just outside data centres, and which includes substations, medium-voltage switchgear, transformers, low-voltage systems, and power distribution equipment. Large AI data centers now require so much electricity that some are comparable to power plants, generating about 1 gigawatt of power. But another big shift is happening inside data centres. Nvidia’s working toward a new 800-volt DC architecture—from 48/54-volt now—to improve power efficiency. That will change how power is delivered to high-density computing racks. Today, racks may consume 100-150 kilowatts. New AI racks could need 1 megawatt. “We are working with Nvidia to design that next generation of data centers,” Wierod says. These data centers are expected in 2028. AI is also changing ABB’s own software and automation work. The focus is on applying AI across industries where ABB is strong and therefore has substantial domain knowhow. A lot of this work, Wierod says, is being led by ABB’s team in Bengaluru. The center has about 4,000 people. Around half work on R&D for new solutions—over 75 patents have come out of this centre—and the other half on project execution for global customers. One striking example of innovation is a software that helps customers migrate from legacy control systems to new upgraded control systems. These systems are large and complex when used in an offshore platform to control oil & gas production or in refinery management. And customers sometimes want to move to a different brand when upgrading. “Changing such a system is a massive exercise. We had a team in Paris which used to do this conversion in about three months. With the software we’ve built here, we are now able to do it in half a day,” Sanjeev Sharma, MD of ABB India, says. The India team has also built Genix, an AI layer that sits on top of control systems. Industrial control systems generate large volumes of data from plants. Genix, Sharma says, uses that data to provide deeper insights and help customers make better decisions on production and maintenance. The India center has also helped build domain-specific AI agents for sectors like cement, steel and chemicals. These agents are trained on ABB’s internal reports, maintenance records and process knowledge. “If you today ask ChatGPT how to run a cement plant, you don’t get very good answers,” Wierod says. But ABB’s AI agent for cement plants, built using its domain expertise, acts like a first-response service assistant. It can help operators understand control-system issues, give advice, and help ABB engineers identify the right spare parts before visiting a site. “Teams in India have been core to these advances,” he says.
