HPE CEO Antonio Neri Confident in Juniper Acquisition, Sees AI Gains

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Antonio Neri confirmed in an interview with Yahoo Finance that the company's acquisition of Juniper Networks is expected to close within the next few weeks. The deal, valued at $5 billion, will create a $35 billion company with networking representing more than 15% of HPE's profits.

Neri expressed excitement about the strategic benefits of the merger, highlighting its potential to accelerate HPE's hybrid cloud and AI offerings. "The core of AI is a hybrid and data-intensive workload," he explained, emphasizing the need for a robust networking infrastructure to connect vast data pools for training and inferencing. "HPE will provide a modern, secure and AI-driven networking fabric," he remarkted.

While acknowledging the importance of energy in driving AI systems, Neri emphasized HPE's focus on system design efficiency. He cited their recent announcement of a 100% fanless direct liquid cool system, capable of reducing power consumption by 90% compared to air-cooled systems. He also pointed out the need to reduce waste and the importance of a circular economy for managing asset lifecycles.

Neri, for his part, remains bullish on the future of AI, despite recent market concerns about peak demand. "We don't see any slowdown on the AI per se," he stated, noting that while the focus has been on model builders and large cloud companies, enterprise adoption is now accelerating. He anticipates a surge in enterprise AI deployments in 2025 and 2026, driven by a desire to leverage AI for productivity gains and cost reduction.

This enterprise focus is also reflected in HPE's strategic partnership with NVIDIA. Neri confirmed that HPE uses NVIDIA's chips, including the Blackwell chip, which is in high demand. He explained that while large providers will be the first to adopt the Blackwell chip, HPE is working on solutions that will make it easier for enterprises and rest of the private sector to deploy AI applications, targeting a simpler user experience.

"With [Nvidia], we focus on that [enterprise] market specifically, and we co-engineer a solution that comes out of the box," said Neri. "Those customers will be on the back end of Blackwell."