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HPE Buying Cray in $1.3B Deal

Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed to buy supercomputer maker Cray in a deal worth roughly $1.3 billion. “Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data,” said HPE CEO Antonio Neri on Friday. High performance…

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computing and "associated storage and services is expected to grow from approximately $28 billion in 2018 to approximately $35 billion in 2021," the buyer said Friday. Simon Leopold of Raymond James asked if the companies are what he called an odd couple, "given the differing business profiles of both companies with HPE focused primarily on commercial and enterprise markets, and Cray primarily focused on academic and industrial supercomputing applications." Artificial intelligence/machine learning and big data analytics "continue to see exponential growth, with businesses still scratching the surface of the different potential use cases," he wrote investors. "Management’s vision is sound." The deal is expected to close in fiscal Q1 ending Jan. 31, an HPE spokesperson emailed us. "The deal is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval." Cray closed up $1.52 higher than the deal's per-share price. It rose 23 percent to $36.52. The deal price excludes Cray's own cash.