Schneider Electric narrowly beat first-quarter revenue expectations on Thursday, once again boosted by the global artificial intelligence data centre buildout reinforcing the French group's role as one of the most sought-after suppliers. Large cloud providers, also known as hyperscalers, are expected to invest more than $600 billion into data centres and other AI-related infrastructure this year alone, analysts say. Schneider makes power equipment, server racks and most importantly cooling systems that let energy-hungry data centres operate at peak performance.