Technology

Hewlett Packard Enterprises Buys America's Most Storied Tech Company

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: May 18, 2019 8:20 am

Last Updated: January 30, 2020 8:38 pm

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HPE), itself part of the history of American tech, has bought Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY), the iconic maker of supercomputers. Bill Hewlett and David Packard started Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ predecessor 80 years ago. Cray began in 1972. While HP became known for PCs, Cray became known for the most powerful computers in the world.

HP was broken into two pieces in 2015 that between them had a market cap reaching into the tens of billions of dollars. Cray had a market cap of about $1 billion when HPE made its offer. Its shares rose 22% on the announcement of the deal to $36.52. That is at the top of its 52-week trading range, which has a low of $18.76.

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri commented on the deal:

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. 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.

While the deal may be good for Cray’s shareholders, one of America’s oldest true tech companies is no longer independent.