Schneider Electric to buy software firm PTC for $22.6 billion in record AI-software bet

Schneider Electric agreed Monday to buy the industrial software company PTC for about $22.6 billion in cash, the French energy and automation giant's largest acquisition ever and one of two corporate buyouts that helped push the Nasdaq to a record close.

Under the terms disclosed in a securities filing, Schneider will pay $205 a share for PTC, a 42.3% premium over the stock's closing price the Friday before the deal was announced and a 46.1% premium to its 30-day trading average. The deal values PTC's equity at roughly $22.6 billion and carries an implied enterprise value of about $23.7 billion, according to the companies' joint press release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

PTC, based in Boston, makes software that manufacturers use to design products, manage engineering data and run factory operations — the kind of "digital thread" technology that tracks a product from a CAD drawing through to the assembly line. Schneider Electric, which already sells industrial automation hardware and energy-management systems, said combining the two businesses would let it build a "contextualized AI data foundation" spanning products, machines, factory processes and energy use.

Big bet, bigger premium

"This acquisition represents an important step forward in our ambition to lead the new era of Energy and Industrial Intelligence," Schneider Electric Chief Executive Olivier Blum said in the companies' announcement. PTC Chief Executive Neil Barua called joining Schneider "an incredible opportunity to elevate the scope and impact of what we deliver for our customers globally."

Schneider expects the combined company to generate about €250 million in annual cost savings by the third year after closing, plus roughly €800 million in additional revenue from cross-selling. To pay for the deal, Schneider plans to raise €5 billion to €6 billion in new equity and borrow another €16 billion to €17 billion, backed for now by a fully committed bridge loan. The transaction still needs approval from PTC shareholders and antitrust regulators in multiple jurisdictions, and the companies said they expect it to close by the third quarter of 2027 — a notably long runway for a deal of this size.

The announcement, alongside a separate buyout elsewhere in the market, was credited by traders with helping lift Wall Street to one of its better sessions of the fall. The Nasdaq composite jumped 1.1% Monday to close at a record 27,477.31, while the S&P 500 rose 0.7% to 7,773.95, within half a percent of its own all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added a more modest 0.2% to 51,267.90. All three indexes remain up sharply for the year, as investors keep betting that corporate spending on artificial intelligence will keep showing up in earnings.

The PTC deal is Schneider's biggest purchase to date, eclipsing its earlier acquisitions of the AI software firm Cognite and the industrial software maker Aveva, underscoring how aggressively traditional industrial conglomerates are now spending to buy their way into the AI boom rather than build competing software from scratch. The long gap before closing gives regulators in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere ample time to scrutinize a deal that would combine two companies with substantial overlap in factory-floor software customers.