HPE Vultr Order Signals AI Rack Demand

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Sept. 30, 2026 said it had won an HPE Vultr order for its AMD Helios racks and raised long-term networking growth targets, steps that expand the company's AI-infrastructure footprint.

Vultr Order and Helios Specifications

HPE said in a Sept. 30 press release that it secured a $1.2 billion order from Vultr, which it described as the world’s largest privately held cloud-infrastructure company. The transaction marks HPE’s first order for the Helios platform, which integrates HPE Networking scale-up switching and software.

Each Helios rack includes 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, AMD Pensando Vulcano AI networking interface cards, AMD ROCm software, and six HPE Juniper Networking QFX5252 scale-up Ethernet switch trays. HPE described Helios as an integrated rack-scale system combining compute, scale-up networking, direct liquid cooling, and services, using open, interoperable rack-scale fabrics such as UALink over Ethernet.

Vultr plans to deploy the systems at its cloud data centers in the United States. HPE and AMD said they will support Vultr’s service-provider and enterprise workloads for AI model training and inference. This deployment highlights HPE’s focus on provider and enterprise AI workloads rather than isolated on-premise projects.

The order builds on nearly three years of collaboration between Vultr and Juniper Networks, now part of HPE, signaling continuity in customer relationships through the Juniper integration. Vultr’s CEO said, “Demand for high-performance AI infrastructure continues to outpace available capacity.”

Networking Outlook and Growth Targets

In a separate Sept. 30 announcement, HPE raised its fiscal year 2027 Networking segment revenue growth outlook to a range of high-teens to low-20s percentage. The company expects Networking revenue from fiscal years 2026 through 2029 to grow at a high-teens compound annual growth rate (CAGR). It projects Data Center Networking revenue to expand at a low-to-high-50s percentage CAGR through fiscal 2029.

HPE also forecasted Networking operating margins in the mid-to-high-20s percentage range from fiscal 2027 through 2029. The company said it expects the Networking segment to outgrow market growth rates and gain share in Data Center Networking, Routing, and Campus & Branch over the next three years. These targets suggest near-term revenue upside for HPE’s systems business as it advances Helios deployments with cloud providers.