HPE has closed its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.

The acquisition doubles the size of its networking business. Rami Rahim, Juniper Networks’ CEO, will lead the combined HPE Networking business.

Rahim earlier told customers: “ I want to be clear that our goal… is not to eliminate products, but to offer enhanced choice and more innovation for all our service providers, cloud providers and enterprise customers.” 

(Juniper and the Aruba division of HPE both sell switches for campus and data centres. They also both sell SD-WANs. Some rationalisation is likely.)

The UK’s CMA had blessed the deal in September ‘24, saying it “does not give rise to a realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition.”

But rumour had abounded that US regulators might block it. 

Some prospective networking hardware buyers had put deals on hold as they awaited the outcome, analysts told The Stack in a piece last year. 

The deal was first announced on January 9, 2024, and was approved by Juniper shareholders on April 2, 2024. Juniper shares stop trading today.

“The acquisition accelerates HPE’s strategic vision with a full networking IP stack: from silicon, to hardware, to the operating system, to security, to software and services, with a cloud-native and AI-driven approach. This integration will accelerate customers’ deployment and adoption of both hybrid cloud and AI” – HPE, July 2, 2025.

HPE anticipates that the Juniper Networks buyout will allow it to push further into the cloud service provider and telco space among others.

As analyst Shamus McGillicuddy ofEnterprise Management Associates earlier told us: “HPE had AI capabilities through its Aruba division, but Juniper was showing more value than anyone else in the market. 

“Also, Juniper has a lot of strength in the telecoms market – particularly with routers, and HPE was targeting that market with its data centre solutions – attempting to sell into the mobile packet core. Juniper helps HPE to build out their portfolio for service providers,” he added. 

(In the WLAN segment CommScope, Fortinet and Ubiquiti are all serious competitors to Juniper Networks. In Campus Switches Arista, Extreme, Fortinet all compete, the UK’s markets watchdog CMA had suggested.)

“We are now at the epicenter of the transformation of IT, where AI and networking are converging,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. 

“In addition to positioning HPE to offer our customers a modern network architecture alternative and an even more differentiated and complete portfolio across hybrid cloud, AI, and networking, this combination accelerates our profitable growth strategy as we deepen our customer relevance and expand our total addressable market into attractive adjacent areas. We look forward to welcoming the Juniper team to HPE.”

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