On the ground at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025

(Image credit: Future)

published 5 December 2025

HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 was in full swing this past week, with thousands of attendees descending on the Fira Barcelona to hear the latest news on the networking, servers, storage, supercomputing – and, of course, AI.

It’s a pivotal time for the firm, as it consolidates its hardware partnerships and heralds a recent acquisition, while laying out its strategy to help customers not only meet demand, but expand their networks and adopt new technologies.

What are some of the biggest things HPE announced – and what does the firm have lined up for 2026 and beyond?

In this episode, Rory interviews Jane live on the ground at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, to unpack all things HPE.

Highlights

"Yes, the integration is rapid, and that's something that both [Rami] Rahim and [Antonio] Neri have been pointing to, that they're not going to take years and years to do this, that, you know, they're starting it now."

"So what's happening? I mean, calling it a 'cross pollination' is perhaps, in my opinion, not quite the right word, because what's actually going on is sort of moving bits from each company across to effectively the other company. So while HPE is talking about that eventually they'll just be unified, and it's going to be one networking business, as things are there is an understanding of the fact that Juniper and Aruba, their backgrounds and specialties are quite different."

"So on the Monday, Nvidia and HPE announced that the first AI factory lab in the European Union – important caveat – is going to be installed in the city of Grenoble in the south of France. It is focused on the sovereign AI element of this. Now, sovereign AI is something that frequently – sovereign cloud as well – frequently comes up at the European conferences, because realistically, it's Europeans and the Middle East who really care about this stuff."

"HPE has launched a Helios project with AMD. So Helios was announced at advancing AI in June, it is a double wide rack scale AI solution. It's being positioned that HPE is the first to do this and it was kind of hinted at that this joint announcement from them, it's Q1 announcement, which is largely what AMD CEO Lisa Su was like hinting at back in June."

Footnotes

TOPICS

Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.

Highlights

Footnotes

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