The European Commission (EC) has given the go-ahead to HPE’s planned megabucks acquisition of Juniper Networks, concluding that the proposed transaction “would raise no competition concerns in the European Economic Area.”
HPE first announced its intentions to dole out $14 billion for Juniper Networks back in January, with plans to combine their respective strengths in networking and IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, routing, switching, security, and related consulting services. Given the role that cloud infrastructure plays in the snowballing AI movement, the companies pitched this merger as a means to “accelerate AI-driven innovation.”
However, a deal of this size was always going to attract regulators, which is precisely why HPE allowed a full year for the transaction to conclude from the point it was announced. The U.K. announced an in-depth probe into the acquisition in June, though Brazil’s regulators gave unconditional clearance to the deal in May.
