HPE Buys Juniper: First Big Salvo in the AI Wars

Deal creates a formidable enterprise networking company that aims to compete for a greater share of the traffic carrying AI workloads.

Artificial intelligence promises a new wave of intelligent automation that will digitally transform major industries. Self-driving cars, AI-guided agriculture, smart city infrastructure — all of these innovations rely on autonomous systems powered by data and algorithms. But the real magic enabling this AI revolution is largely invisible; it’s the network infrastructure shuttling massive data flows at the speed of light.

As AI adoption explodes, networks will be pushed to their limits by huge volumes of data needed to train machine learning models and power real-time analytics. 5G, IoT devices, and edge computing will place increasing demands on underlying network capacity and intelligence. This is why Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks is such a strategic bet on the future.