Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares climbed 5% on Wednesday and touched a 52-week high of $67.10 after the company announced a $1.2 billion order from cloud provider Vultr for AMD Helios AI Rack systems across Vultr’s US data centers. The deal is HPE’s first major commercial order for the AMD Helios platform, giving the company a flagship customer for AMD’s latest rack-scale AI architecture. HPE shares have gained more than 160% this year.
Each Helios rack combines 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs with AMD EPYC 'Venice' CPUs, Pensando Vulcano AI networking cards and ROCm software. HPE said the configuration was designed by AMD for training trillion-parameter models and high-volume inference. The company will also supply networking infrastructure, including six HPE Juniper Networking QFX5252 scale-up Ethernet switch trays per rack, as well as liquid cooling and deployment services through its global services arm.
Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell said demand for high-performance AI infrastructure 'continues to outpace available capacity,' adding that the new systems would help Vultr bring rack-scale computing and networking online faster for customers running large training and inference workloads. HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri said AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in history and that HPE, AMD and Vultr are building an open foundation to accelerate the next phase of AI.
Separately, HPE raised its fiscal 2027 networking revenue growth outlook to the high-teens to low-20s percentage range, up from the prior 14% to 17% range. Data-center networking revenue is expected to grow at a low-to-high 50s percentage compound annual rate through fiscal 2029, while routing revenue is forecast to increase in the low-to-high 20s range. HPE also lifted its Juniper Networks acquisition cost-savings target by 33% to at least $800 million in annual run-rate savings by the end of fiscal 2028, compared with at least $600 million previously. Wall Street remains generally positive, with Visible Alpha reporting seven buy ratings and four neutral ratings and a mean price target just above $70, while TipRanks shows 10 buys, seven holds and zero sells with an average target of $70.13.
