CEO Neri to HPE Shareholders: ‘We Have AI Covered’

HPE CEO Antonio Neri defended his company’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy at Wednesday's annual HPE shareholder meeting, claiming it is uniquely positioned to become an AI leader.

While taking questions during the virtual meeting, Neri disagreed with a suggestion that HPE competitors are getting more traction in AI. He did say HPE needed to do a better job clarifying its AI capabilities.

“I don’t believe our competitors are ahead of us,” Neri said. “HPE has a unique portfolio that covers all the aspects of AI, which is training, tuning, and inferencing.”

He pointed to HPE’s super-computing capabilities, data center services, more than 500 liquid cooling patents to help make running AI systems sustainable, networking from its pending $14 billion Juniper Networks acquisition, and servers as its AI differentiators.

“That’s why we believe this is going to be one of the biggest opportunities in the history of our company, which is at an inflection point at the right time with our technology,” he said. “The investment in Juniper will accelerate that because, by design, AI is a distributed workloads that needs the network.”

HPE's Antonio Neri

He also said AI also gives HPE’s server business new life “because with AI, everything needs compute. People need to take a hard look at the server side.” And the Juniper deal comes at the right time because now “the world needs more ports.”

HPE’s GreenLake hybrid cloud strategy also fits with AI, he said.

“At its core, AI is fundamentally a hybrid cloud as customers need to inference data at the edge of the network where the majority of the data is generated,” he said.

HPE chairwoman Patricia Russo praised HPE’s strategy around AI, hybrid cloud and networking.

"We will capitalize on market expansion opportunities that will help us fuel growth and create value for shareholders,” she said.

Russo said the Juniper acquisition “changes the dynamics of the market and helps balance the company’s portfolio.”

HPE shareholders gave the executive team a vote of approval by following the board’s recommendations on all five issues on the ballot. The votes included the election of 12 board members and ratification of the executive compensation plan.

Although HPE missed expectations with revenue and guidance for its most recent quarter, Neri pointed out that 2023 revenue of $29.1 billion was its highest in his four years as CEO. He said HPE has returned $11 billion to shareholders in dividends and share buybacks since 2018.

Russo said the board has “great confidence” in HPE’s leadership.

 “There is more to do – there always is – but we’re confident in leadership’s ability,” she said.