HPE is one of those companies that is constantly reinventing itself. Thus, it was exciting to have an opportunity to attend HPE’s recent Investor Relations forum event — the HPE Investor Relations AI day — and also have the chance to visit the HPE Wisconsin Plant, where tours were offered within this very secure facility. What those attending discovered was more than impressive, and it gave us an understanding of HPE’s DNA in 2025 and how the company plans to succeed in AI. Let’s talk about what we learned.
HPE focuses on the high-performance and scalable computing systems that can make AI work. For those of you who are AI engineers, you already understand that the ability to train these systems and provide inference processing takes considerable processing power. These are not commodity servers by any means, and the ability to build and deploy these systems is a critical path to AI success for most enterprises. This is why I view what HPE is doing today as more crucial than ever.
HPE Investor Relations AI Day: the HPE tour
During the HPE Investor Relations AI day event, HPE executives led the tour through the highly secure facility. It was impressive that the executives understood all aspects of production and the servers being created and didn’t need to rely on the staff to conduct these tours. Clearly these are committed executives who learn as much as they lead, and all of our group’s most technical questions were answered.
Neil MacDonald, Executive Vice President and General Manager at HPE leading High-Performance Computing and AI units, led our tour. MacDonald’s work focuses on advancing HPE’s compute solutions and delivering integrated systems for HPC and AI globally. His background in AI was impressive, as was his understanding of AI and grasp of the evolving nature of the AI technology space. In dealing with many executives over the years, I found MacDonald to be unique, having the right balance of technology and leadership skills.
HPE has an impressive line of high-performance computers (HPCs) and having the opportunity to see the manufacturing process was not only exceptional, but also something most of us are rarely allowed to see up close. This included manufacturing and assembly of HPE’s Liquid Cooling Systems (LCS) based computers.
MacDonald introduced the concept of LCSs to the group and, while most of us have heard of LCSs over the years, we largely have yet to make the connection between LCS-based servers and those needed to drive modern generative AI. Indeed, they may be the only way to make generative AI work in the future and keep to sustainable power consumption objectives.
What was most significant about the tour was moving from the LCS side of the data center to the air-cooled side. Those of us who have worked in data centers understand the defining blast of air that flows through them, which are needed to cool the processors. To say that the data center environment can be loud is no understatement. That’s what I immediately noticed about the side of the data center that leveraged HPE’s LCS systems — there was almost no noise and, at the same time, HPE’s LCS systems provided more efficient cooling. This means less noise, less energy consumption, and more processing power, all supporting the next generation of AI systems that are about to go into production. It was amazing to witness this firsthand.
Looking Ahead for HPE
What came out of the HPE Investor Relations AI Day, the tour, and the briefings is that HPEs vision is strategic and well-defined. HPE CEO Antonio Neri was on-site during the day to brief the group of analysts on the state of the company. This included some impressive growth, an outcome of Antonio’s leadership. He provided a fantastic speech at HPE Discovery, which seems to have kept the momentum going, including the ability to turn HPE into a technology leader that other companies endeavor to emulate.
It was clear during Neri’s speech, along with Neal’s, that they are not looking backward and understand that the only way they can define success for HPE is to commit to being the innovator and not the follower. This takes a certain amount of desire for risk, which many public companies attempt to avoid. The HPE executive team has an impressive reputation for innovation, and it’s clear that embracing risk is the only path forward, as the rapidly-evolving AI market reflects.
The AI market is a large space that has yet to be defined, and in a relatively short period of time, we see that modern technology executive teams need a lot of courage these days — and most are not showing as much now. I believe that organizations have two choices: you can either let the market define you, or you can take the lead and define yourself. Fortunately, HPE has taken the latter and most difficult path. While this is to their credit, HPE has its work cut out for them for at least the next five years or so.
Right Formula?
Leaving HPE Investor Relations AI day, it was clear that the analysts in attendance better understood HPE’s adopted mission and how they plan to execute on that mission. As a public company, HPE juggles complex responsibilities to investors with the obligation to be innovative. Those are often things that work counter to one other, but HPE has figured out the right mix of revenue growth while maintaining a creative position in the market. Investors should find that attractive; I know those in attendance in Wisconsin did.
In continuing to watch HPE, I suspect we’ll see more of what we witnessed during HPE AI Day, and given HPE’s chosen lanes, this will likely play out in their favor. We’ll all be watching.
See related coverage here:
What’s Old is New: My Day at HPE Investor Relations AI Day
HPE’s Acquisition of Morpeus Data and Its Strategic Implications
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