Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that they are buying supercomputer maker Cray for $1.3 billion. This acquisition will give HPE access to the high performing computer and maybe to the quantum computer in the future. HPE is paying $35 per share for the opportunity, which is $5.19 premium over Cray’s closing price of $29.81 on Thursday.
Cray was founded in 1972 by the ‘father of supercomputer’ Seymour Cray. Cray introduced the US to cutting edge computing technology. Cray is currently building two supercomputers. One is Frontier, world’s fastest supercomputer, with AMD and another one is Aurora with Intel.
“Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data. Only by processing and analyzing this data will we be able to unlock the answers to critical challenges across medicine, climate change, space and more,” HPE CEO Antonio Neri said in a statement. “Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high-performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work.”
Cray CEO and president Peter Ungaro also share the same feeling by saying, “We believe that the combination of Cray and HPE creates an industry leader in the fast-growing High-Performance Computing (HPC) and AI markets and creates a number of opportunities that neither company would likely be able to capture on their own.”
HPE said it expects the transaction to close by the first quarter of its 2020 fiscal year, pending customary regulatory approval.