Just last week, we learned that AMD would be teaming up with Cray to build the world’s fastest supercomputer for scientists in the US. Now, Cray has more big news, as the supercomputing specialist has been acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1.3 billion.
HPE announced today that it has acquired Cray in a deal worth around $1.3 billion in total, or $35 per share. By adding Cray to its portfolio, HPE is hoping to “drive the next generation of high performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work”.
Based on current market estimations, the high-performance computing segment is expected to grow from a $28 billion industry in 2018 to $35 billion in 2021. Exascale computing will play a big part in this and is something that Cray is already working on as part of its supercomputer collaboration with AMD.
As for customer-specific benefits, HPE says that the Cray acquisition will deliver increased innovation, enhanced supply chain capabilities and a more comprehensive end-to-end portfolio of HPC infrastructure- spanning across compute, storage, system interconnects, software and services.
The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 of HPE’s 2020 fiscal year, assuming all the regulatory approvals come through without issues.
KitGuru Says: This is a rather big acquisition for HPE and also comes at a very interesting time, as the 2021 supercomputer project was just announced very recently with $600 million in funding.