Case Study: SNCF achieves 10% energy reduction and 30% data-infrastructure cost savings with Databricks Lakehouse

Accelerating sustainable transportation into the future

SNCF, France’s national rail operator with a 30,000 km network and tens of thousands of daily trains, needed to meet ambitious sustainability targets (‑30% CO2 by 2030, Net Zero by 2050) but was held back by legacy systems. The company struggled to ingest and process massive IoT volumes (about 90 million rows/month from 10–15k trains daily), faced data silos, slow collaboration and costly, hard-to-maintain pipelines that prevented timely energy insights.

SNCF implemented the Databricks Lakehouse with Delta Lake to create a single source of truth, enable auto‑scaling ETL, and streamline analytics with Power BI and collaborative notebooks. The move cut data infrastructure costs by 30%, reduced energy consumption by 10%, lowered ops/dev time by up to 50%, and delivers five‑minute energy measurements and frequent refreshed reports that drive operational changes to support its sustainability goals.

SNCF

Rémi Bihouis

ITNOVEM, IT Partner