Siemens, NVIDIA join hands to build industrial metaverse

Siemens and U.S.-based chip designer NVIDIA have announced that they are expanding their partnership to build an industrial metaverse and increase the use of AI-driven technology to help boost industrial automation. 

The first step of the collaboration will see Siemens’ Xcelerator, an open digital business platform developed by the German company, connect with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for 3D design and collaboration, Siemens announced on June 29. 

The integration will create an industrial metaverse with physics-based digital models from Siemens and real-time AI from NVIDIA, allowing companies to make decisions faster and with increased confidence, it said.

The addition of Omniverse to the open Siemens Xcelerator partner ecosystem will accelerate the use of digital twins that can deliver productivity and process improvements across production and product life cycles, Siemens said. 

Companies will be able to employ digital twins with real-time performance data; create innovative industrial IoT solutions; leverage actionable insights from analytics at the edge or in the cloud; and tackle engineering challenges by making visually immersive simulations more accessible, Siemens said.

Siemens president and chief executive Roland Busch said: “When Siemens Xcelerator is connected to Omniverse, we will enable a real-time, immersive metaverse that connects hardware and software, from the edge to the cloud with rich data from Siemens’ software and solutions.

NVIDIA founder and chief executive Jensen Huang said the partnership was the first step in their joint effort to realise their common vision for digital transformation. 

“The connection to Siemens Xcelerator will open NVIDIA’s Omniverse and AI ecosystem to a whole new world of industrial automation that is built using Siemens’ mechanical, electrical, software, IoT and edge solutions,” Huang said.