Siemens and NVIDIA run AI planning agents in Erlangen factory

Siemens and NVIDIA run AI planning agents in Erlangen factory

19 October 2026: Siemens has put two AI systems built with NVIDIA into live production at its electronics factory in Erlangen, Germany: an agent that drafts production plans and tests them in a digital twin before anything changes on the floor, and a pipeline that generates synthetic images of circuit boards so inspection cameras can be trained before the first physical prototype exists. Siemens says the second cuts engineering effort for a new board's ramp-up by up to 85% and time to market by up to 40%.

Not yet independently verified. The savings figures are Siemens' own "up to" figures from one plant, and Siemens has not said when or how the tools will be sold to other manufacturers. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Training inspection before the board exists

Erlangen builds drives and frequency converters, and the printed circuit board assemblies inside them are the bottleneck when a new product starts. Siemens says preparing quality inspection used to take several weeks, because teams had to wait for physical prototypes to train the vision systems and then configure the inspection equipment by hand. Now photorealistic images of each assembly are generated from its digital twin and used to train the vision systems in advance. The release names NVIDIA's Cosmos world models as the source of that training data.

An agent that proposes the plan

The second system addresses the planner's daily trade-off between capacity, material availability, delivery dates and line assignments. When an order arrives, an AI agent generates several production scenarios and shows planners how each affects the plant's defined indicators. Each proposal is validated in a digital twin of the whole facility before it is adopted. Siemens credits agent-based planning with cost savings of up to 20%, and names NVIDIA's Factory Operations Blueprint and Omniverse libraries alongside its own industrial software and automation.

The two companies said at CES in January 2026 that they would build what they called the first fully AI-powered manufacturing sites. Siemens says the joint team built these first applications in under ten months by developing them directly on the production line, and that more are planned in the coming months.

A showcase plant with its own figures

Cedrik Neike, who runs Siemens Digital Industries, said the plant shows "the future of industry is not just discussed; it is becoming reality today." Rev Lebaredian, NVIDIA's vice-president for physical AI simulation, said: "Factories need to handle change as well as they handle repetition."

Siemens says Erlangen raises productivity by about 7% a year and receives around 3,000 customer visits annually, which is the point: the plant is a sales floor for Siemens' own automation and industrial software. The release gives no product names, prices or dates for when other manufacturers can buy these two tools, so the figures describe one well-instrumented Siemens plant rather than a typical brownfield site.

Related on TrustList:

• Siemens will run Galp's 100 MW Sines hydrogen plant from a digital twin
• P&G takes Siemens-built AI quality inspection to plants worldwide
• Doosan Robotics wins two Korean Physical AI projects worth KRW 98.9 billion

Sources

• Siemens: Siemens partners with NVIDIA to advance AI-driven, autonomous factories, 19 October 2026