At last week’s CES in Las Vegas, soft drinks giant Pepsi announced a multi-year collaboration with Siemens and Nvidia to transform plant and supply chain operations through digital-twin technology and AI.

This collaboration is said to mark a first-of-its-kind initiative for a global CPG company applying digital twins to reshape how plant and warehousing facilities are digitally simulated and tested, with early pilots already underway in the USA.

With demand for production and distribution capacity rising, Pepsi is using AI and new digital approaches to process simulation and facility design to retool and optimise its existing physical footprint. Traditional expansion methods are slow and costly, limiting flexibility and the scalability needed to meet growing consumer needs while driving innovation.

“The scale and complexity of Pepsi’s business, from farm to shelf, is massive, and we are embedding AI throughout our operations to better meet the increasing demands of our consumers and customers,” said Ramon Laguarta, CEO of Pepsi. “Our work with Siemens and Nvidia will help accelerate our continued journey of becoming a future-fit company, operating with agility and foresight.”

Pepsi is shifting to a digital-first planning strategy, leveraging physics-based digital twins and AI agents as co-designers to simulate, validate and optimise facility layouts before any physical build. As part of these efforts, Pepsi is using the Siemens Digital Twin Composer, built on Nvidia Omniverse libraries, to simulate upgrades to its facilities in the USA with plans to scale globally.

“Physical industries are entering the age of AI,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia (www.nvidia.com). “For companies with real-world assets, digital twins are the foundation of their AI journey. Working with Nvidia and Siemens, Pepsi is re-architecting its operations using physically accurate digital twins and AI to reinvent how it designs, optimises and runs its global operations.”

Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens (www.siemens.com), added: “We are proud to partner with Pepsi and Nvidia to digitally transform their manufacturing facilities using physics-based digital twins and AI from design to engineering to operations. The Digital Twin Composer is a cornerstone in enabling Pepsi to transform manufacturing and warehousing. Siemens is powering the industrial AI revolution with an unmatched industrial AI technology stack, deep domain knowhow and world-class partners. This collaboration sets a new standard for all industries. Customers can turn ideas into real-world impact with greater speed, quality and efficiency.”

Siemens’ software builds industrial metaverse environments at scale, empowering organisations to apply industrial AI, simulation and real-time physical data to make decisions virtually, at speed and at scale.

This product helps industrial companies combine 2D and 3D digital-twin data from Siemens’ digital twin and physical real-time information from a managed, secure real-time photorealistic virtual scene accelerated by Nvidia Omniverse libraries.

With Digital Twin Composer, companies can rapidly build and maintain this global environment, containing all aspects of their product or production data, both virtual and physical, in a secure, managed, high-fidelity 3D experience throughout the lifecycle of the product, process or facility.

Pepsi and Siemens are digitally transforming select US manufacturing and warehouse facilities by converting them into high-fidelity 3D digital twins that simulate plant operations and the end-to-end supply chain to establish a performance baseline.

Pepsi can now recreate every machine, conveyor, pallet route and operator path with physics-level accuracy, enabling AI agents to simulate, test and refine system changes, identifying up to 90 per cent of potential issues before any physical modifications occur. This approach has already delivered a 20 per cent increase in throughput on initial deployment and is driving faster design cycles, nearly 100 per cent design validation and 10 to 15 per cent reductions in capital expenditure by uncovering hidden capacity and validating investments in a virtual environment.

“We are deploying the first digital blueprint that reimagines how the supply chain is designed, built and scaled, a first for the industry,” said Athina Kanioura from Pepsi (www.pepsico.com). “With a unified, AI-powered digital foundation, Pepsi is building towards a world where every plant and warehouse operates as part of a single, intelligent ecosystem. In this future, our facilities don’t just respond to demand, they anticipate and then adapt to it.”