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