HPE’s Acquisition of Cray Could Boost Its Quantum-Computing Capabilities

(FierceTelecom) HPE announced on Friday it is buying supercomputing company Cray for $1.3 billion in a move that could boost its quantum-computing capabilities in the future. The deal would be San Jose-based HPE’s largest since it split from Hewlett Packard in 2015. HPE is paying $35 per share for Cray, which is a $5.19 premium over Thursday’s closing price of $29.81 per share. The deal is subject to usual regulatory approvals, but is expected to close in HPE’s fiscal first quarter of next year.
Cray became well known in the 1970s as one of the preeminent super computing companies in the United States. Cray’s supercomputing systems, which include its current generation XC and CS platforms, and next-generation Shasta series platform, have the ability to handle massive data sets, converged modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics workloads.
High-performance computing (HPC) is becoming a more important element with the explosion of data from AI, machine learning, and big data analytics. Evolving customer needs for data-intensive workloads is also driving the expansion of HPC. Over the next three years the HPC segment of the market and associated storage and services is expected to grow from about $28 billion in 2018 to about $35 billion in 2021, a compound annual growth rate of approximately 9%, according to HPE’s press release.