At , at 3DEXPERIENCE World in Houston, Dassault Systèmes and NVIDIA unveiled a deepened strategic partnership aimed at establishing a shared industrial architecture for artificial intelligence. The collaboration centers on combining Dassault Systèmes’ Virtual Twin technologies with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure to create what the companies are calling “Industry World Models” – science-validated AI systems designed to simulate and optimize complex systems across a range of industries.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang described AI as becoming a fundamental infrastructure component, akin to electricity or the internet. He framed the partnership as a means to dramatically scale engineering capabilities, potentially by factors of 100, 1,000, or even 1 million. “This is the largest collaboration our two companies have ever had in over a quarter century,” Huang stated, emphasizing the long-standing relationship between the two technology leaders.
From Virtual Twins to Industry World Models
The core idea behind this partnership is to move beyond traditional digital models and create dynamic, physics-based simulations that accurately reflect real-world behavior. Dassault Systèmes has long been a pioneer in Virtual Twin technology, allowing engineers to create digital replicas of products and processes. However, the integration with NVIDIA’s AI capabilities promises to take this concept to a new level.
According to Pascal Daloz, CEO of Dassault Systèmes, Virtual Twins are not simply applications, but rather “knowledge factories” – environments where knowledge is created, tested and validated before physical implementation. The partnership aims to establish Industry World Models that are grounded in scientific principles and can serve as mission-critical platforms for innovation in fields like biology, materials science, engineering, and manufacturing.
This shift represents a move towards designing and operating entire factories in software. The companies envision a future where factories are treated as living systems, constantly optimized and adapted through virtual simulation and AI-driven control. Dassault Systèmes is deploying NVIDIA-powered AI factories on three continents through its OUTSCALE sovereign cloud, addressing concerns around data residency and security.
Applications Across Industries
The collaboration will manifest in several key areas:
- Advancing Biology and Materials Research: The NVIDIA BioNeMo platform will be integrated with BIOVIA, Dassault Systèmes’ science-validated world models, to accelerate the discovery of new molecules and materials.
- AI-Driven Design and Engineering: SIMULIA, Dassault Systèmes’ simulation software, will leverage NVIDIA CUDA-X and AI physics libraries to enable more accurate and rapid prediction of design outcomes.
- Virtual Twins for Every Factory: NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for creating and operating virtual worlds, will be combined with DELMIA, Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twin platform for manufacturing, to create autonomous, software-defined production systems.
- Virtual Companions: The 3DEXPERIENCE platform will incorporate NVIDIA AI technologies and the NVIDIA Nemotron open models to provide “Virtual Companions” – AI assistants that offer contextualized intelligence and support to engineers and designers.
Huang highlighted the potential for AI to learn the underlying “language” of complex systems, such as those found in biology and materials science, and then generate novel options for evaluation and validation in simulation. This approach could significantly accelerate the pace of innovation in these fields.
Augmenting, Not Replacing, Engineers
Both Huang and Daloz were careful to emphasize that the goal of this partnership is not to replace engineers, but to augment their capabilities. The introduction of AI companions is intended to free up engineers from repetitive and exploratory tasks, allowing them to focus on more creative and strategic work.
“Success is not about automation,” Daloz said. “Engineers don’t want to automate the past – they want to invent the future.” Huang echoed this sentiment, stating that every designer will soon have a “team of companions” to assist them, fundamentally changing the engineering workflow.
The partnership represents a significant investment in the future of industrial AI, and the companies are showcasing their collaboration at GTC San Jose from to , with a session on virtual twins led by Florence Hu-Aubigny and demonstrations at booth 1841 in the Industrial AI and Robotics pavilion.
the collaboration between Dassault Systèmes and NVIDIA aims to unlock new possibilities for innovation, reduce the risk of costly mistakes, and create entirely new categories of products by leveraging the power of virtual twins and AI-driven simulation.
