Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Cray Inc. have entered into a definitive agreement under which HPE will acquire Cray for $35.00 per share in cash, in a transaction valued at approximately $1.3 billion, net of cash.

“Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data,” said Antonio Neri, President and CEO, HPE. “Only by processing and analyzing this data will we be able to unlock the answers to critical challenges across medicine, climate change, space and more. Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work.”

Cray is a provider of high-end supercomputing solutions that address challenging, data-intensive workloads for making critical decisions. The company has a leadership position in the top 100 supercomputer installations around the globe. It is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with US-based manufacturing, and approximately 1,300 employees worldwide. The company delivered revenue of $456 million in its most recent fiscal year, up 16 percent year over year.

Cray’s supercomputing systems, delivered through their current generation XC and CS platforms, and next-generation Shasta series platform, have the ability to handle massive data sets, converged modeling, simulation, AI, and analytics workloads. In addition to supercomputers, they offer high-performance storage, low-latency high performance HPC interconnects, a full HPC system software stack and programming environment, data analytics, and AI solutions – all currently delivered through integrated systems.

Cray recently announced an Exascale supercomputer contract for over $600 million for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system, which is targeted to be the world’s fastest system, will enable research and AI at unprecedented scale, using Cray’s new Shasta system architecture and Slingshot interconnect. The company was also part of an award with Intel for the first U.S. Exascale contract from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, with Cray’s portion of the contract valued at over $100 million.

High performance computing is a key component of HPE’s vision and growth strategy and the company currently offers HPC solutions, including HPE Apollo and SGI. This portfolio will be further strengthened by leveraging Cray’s foundational technologies and adding complementary solutions. The combined company will also reach a broader set of end markets. T

The combination of HPE and Cray is expected to deliver future HPC-as-a-Service and AI / ML analytics through HPE GreenLake, along with a comprehensive end-to-end portfolio of HPC infrastructure – compute, high-performance storage, system interconnects, software and services supplementing existing HPE capabilities.

The deal is expected to be accretive to HPE non-GAAP operating profit and earnings in the first full year following the close.

As part of the transaction, HPE expects to incur one-time integration costs that will be absorbed within HPE’s FY20 free cash flow outlook of $1.9B to $2.1B that remains unchanged.

The transaction is expected to close by the first quarter of HPE’s fiscal year 2020, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.