SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced a $1.3 billion deal to buy supercomputer maker Cray, part of a move to expand into data analysis from connected devices.
The acquisition comes as sensors, mobile devices and more gather mountains of information about people, things, and developments that can be mined for insights.
“Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data,” said HPE chief executive Antonio Neri.
“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.”
Neri described Seattle-based Cray as a global leader in supercomputing and said the merger will help HPE excel at high-performance computing.
“This is an amazing opportunity to bring together Cray’s leading-edge technology and HPE’s wide reach and deep product portfolio,” said Cray chief executive Peter Ungaro.
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The merger faces regulatory approval.
HPE, based in Palo Alto, California, was the created in November 2015 from the breakup of computing giant Hewlett-Packard into consumer and business units.
Cray, whose history dates back to the 1970s, built some of the first supercomputers and recently won a contract for over $600 million for the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory targeted to be the world’s fastest system.