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.”
The news comes a little more than a month after HPE notified the EC of the planned transaction.
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. While Brazil’s regulators gave unconditional clearance to the deal in May, a month later the U.K. announced it would investigate the deal, and it now has two more weeks to decide whether to approve or progress things to a deeper “phase 2” investigation.
Passing EU regulatory hurdles is a major deal for HPE and Juniper though, and it could be a harbinger of what’s to come in the U.K. later this month — but there are no guarantees. Last year, the EU greenlighted Microsoft’s Activision acquisition, while the U.K. blocked it.
So the HPE and Juniper Networks deal isn’t quite over the line yet, but it’s certainly a lot closer.
