Aramco's Cognite stake doubles to $229 million after Schneider deal
Category: AI & ML
By Emily Carter
Published: 2026-07-02T05:23:00.000Z
When Saudi Aramco quietly took a 7.4 per cent slice of Cognite in early 2022, it paid somewhere around 113 million dollars for the privilege, a figure Aker BP put at roughly one billion Norwegian crowns at the time. Four years on, that same holding is worth close to 229 million dollars, effectively double what the Saudi oil major spent, and the reason is a landmark deal unveiled on 30 June. Schneider Electric, the French energy management and automation heavyweight, has agreed to buy the Norwegian industrial artificial intelligence firm outright in an all-cash transaction valued at 3.1 billion dollars.
When Saudi Aramco quietly took a 7.4 per cent slice of Cognite in early 2022, it paid somewhere around 113 million dollars for the privilege, a figure Aker BP put at roughly one billion Norwegian crowns at the time. Four years on, that same holding is worth close to 229 million dollars, effectively double what the Saudi oil major spent, and the reason is a landmark deal unveiled on 30 June. Schneider Electric, the French energy management and automation heavyweight, has agreed to buy the Norwegian industrial artificial intelligence firm outright in an all-cash transaction valued at 3.1 billion dollars. The arithmetic is straightforward enough. Seven point four per cent of 3.1 billion dollars works out at about 229 million dollars, comfortably above the sum Aramco handed over when it bought its shares from Aker BP through its subsidiary Aramco Overseas Company. Back then the deal valued Cognite at just over 1.5 billion dollars. The Schneider agreement values it at roughly twice that, which is why every shareholder on the register is walking away considerably better off, none more so than the original owner Aker, which is realizing around 1.48 billion dollars and something close to twenty times its invested capital in what is being called the largest software exit in Norway's history. Cognite was founded in Oslo in 2016, spun out of the Norwegian conglomerate Aker, and built its name on a platform called Cognite Data Fusion. The software takes the messy, fragmented operational data thrown off by ageing industrial equipment and organizes it into something that artificial intelligence systems can actually use, powering things like predictive maintenance, digital twins and process optimization. It has grown into a genuinely sizeable business, posting more than 170 million dollars in revenue last year alongside 36 per cent growth in annual recurring bookings, with around 800 staff worldwide. Schneider plans to fold it into AVEVA, its wholly owned industrial software arm, betting that whoever controls the data layer beneath the factory floor controls the future of industrial intelligence. For the Middle East, this story has always been about more than money. Aramco did not arrive at Cognite as a passive financial backer but as a customer and a partner, having set up a joint venture with the company in late 2020 aimed squarely at accelerating industrial digitalization across Saudi Arabia and the wider region. Cognite Data Fusion has since been used to streamline Aramco's own operations, and the tie-up fed neatly into the kingdom's broader push under Vision 2030 to modernize its energy and industrial base. With Schneider now taking the reins, regional customers gain a far larger owner with deep automation credentials, though it also hands a French multinational a bigger foothold in a market where Siemens and Honeywell are already fighting hard for the same industrial AI business.