Hewlett Packard Enterprise completed its previously announced acquisition of Cray Inc., the legendary supercomputer developer. The deal, which was first announced in May, was valued at approximately $1.3 billion, net of cash.
“Bringing together Cray and HPE establishes the most comprehensive end-to-end portfolio across compute, storage, software and services in the fast-growing high performance computing and artificial intelligence market segments,” said Phil Davis, president, Hybrid IT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “But, the real value is what we can accomplish together as one team. We are united in our vision to be a global leader in high performance computing. By combining the teams’ deep expertise and R&D engines, we are better positioned to help our customers solve their most data-intensive challenges both today and well into the future.”
Cray traces its origin back to 1972 and the founding of Cray Research. The company is currently based in Seattle, with US-based manufacturing, and approximately 1,300 employees worldwide. The company delivered revenue of $456 million in its most recent fiscal year, up 16 percent year over year.
Cray recently announced an Exascale supercomputer contract for over $600 million for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system, which is targeted to be the world’s fastest system, uses Cray’s new Shasta system architecture and Slingshot interconnect. The company was also part of an award with Intel for the first U.S. Exascale contract from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, with Cray’s portion of the contract valued at over $100 million.