EU greenlights HPE’s $14B Juniper Networks acquisition

The European Commission (EC) has given the go-ahead for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) planned 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. The deal would combine the two companies’ respective strengths in networking and IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, routing, switching, security, and related consulting services. Given the role that cloud infrastructure is playing 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 regulatory attention, which is precisely why HPE allowed a full year for the transaction to conclude after it was announced. While Brazil’s regulators gave unconditional clearance to the deal in May, a month later, the U.K. said 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.

The EC said that it assessed a number of factors to determine whether a combined company would lessen the competition in areas such as the supply of wireless local area network (WLAN) equipment; wireless access points (WAP); ethernet campus switches; and datacenter switches. While regulators acknowledged the overlap between HPE and Juniper Networks in these areas, it said that the “merged entity’s market position would remain moderate” due to the existence of other “strong and established players” in the sector. While the EC didn’t single out any particular entity, notable competitors include the likes of Cisco and Extreme Networks.

Hurdles

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. Still, there are no guarantees: Last year, the EU greenlighted Microsoft’s Activision acquisition, but the U.K. blocked it and only approved it after the companies gave U.K. regulators a number of concessions.

There is also still scope for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to intervene, though there has been little to suggest that this might happen in the six months since the merger plans were first announced.

In a statement issued to TechCrunch, HPE said that the EC’s approval “satisfies a major closing condition to the proposed acquisition,” and although it wouldn’t confirm which other regulatory jurisdictions it’s still awaiting the go-ahead from, it still expects to close the transaction by early 2025.

“We will continue working to complete all necessary remaining reviews and secure additional clearances quickly and efficiently so that we can begin delivering value to our customers as soon as possible,” an HPE spokesperson said.

So for now, the HPE and Juniper Networks’ deal isn’t quite over the line yet, but with European approval in the bag, it’s certainly a lot closer.