Chief Executive Officer, President & Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co
Antonio Fabio Neri Talks Business Opportunities of AI | Bloomberg Talks
Hewlett Packard Enterprise President/CEO Antonio Neri discusses HPE's goals to join its competitors in AI implementation with Bloomberg's Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney.
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About Antonio Neri
Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has been active in public appearances and earnings calls discussing the company's growth driven by demand for AI infrastructure. In June 2026, Neri reported a "record breaking" second quarter, citing strong demand across HPE's portfolio in networking, cloud, and AI. He stated that the company raised its fiscal 2026 guidance and provided an early outlook for fiscal 2027, which he attributed to the "durability of the demand" and a pipeline that "remains multiples of the current backlog." Neri described the Juniper acquisition as a "home run" and noted that the combined portfolio is strengthening HPE's market position. At HPE Discover 2026, Neri highlighted the role of networking as a critical enabler and bottleneck for AI, and announced new products and partnerships, including a quantum computing alliance with six companies. He discussed the shift toward "agentic AI" and the "agentic enterprise," stating that AI adoption has accelerated in the last six to nine months. Neri also addressed financial strategy, saying HPE expects to return to two times leverage by the end of fiscal 2026 and return approximately 75% of free cash flow to shareholders starting in 2027. He characterized the current period as a "technology platform shift" driven by AI agents and emphasized that "the future belongs to the fast."
Transcript (12 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Host0:00
[Music]
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Antonio Neri of HPE, their CEO. And I'm going to put up here for those of you on YouTube, you can see one of my most beloved Hewlett-Packard artifacts. This is the 12C that got me into this chair with the obligatory CFA sticker on it. And Sweeney's got their killer Antonio Neri HP 12C app on his Apple iPhone. Mr. Neri, honored to have you with us today. I want to carry on from Chris Miller's wonderful "Chip Wars" – The Battle of say, Silicon Graphics coming into HPE, and all of this hot air about AI. You've got HPE GreenLake; how are you going to join Nvidia and Microsoft, your good competitors, in the excitement of AI? What's the path over the next two years?
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Antonio Neri1:01
Well, good morning Tom and Paul, thanks for having me. Today, obviously we are living in a massive inflection point with AI, where I think it's the most revolutionary technology of our lifetime, it's going to change everything: the way we work, the way we live. And when you think about that opportunity, I think about the opportunity to change everything from a technology standpoint, but also from the business standpoint. And so us with HPE GreenLake, we have a unique opportunity to democratize these AI technologies to everyone, because today AI has been only used for large institutions, government, academia. But going forward, enterprises have to adopt those technologies.
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Host1:45
GreenLake, I get the AI idea within computer science, like what you've done in your leadership over the years at Hewlett-Packard. But I don't understand, and I think there's a lot of doubters when you say at HPE GreenLake you're going to unleash the potential of your people. What does it actually mean two years out?
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Antonio Neri2:05
Well, it means a significant amount of automation and business insight that you can gather through the data and the application of these technologies. We see that across multiple vectors or industries: robotics in manufacturing, finding cures for major diseases. We have some amazing use cases we work in today with AI finding a cure for Alzheimer and dementia. One of the things we're doing is trying to model the entire neurological brain to find the protein that is causing those issues, but also better climate research and forecasting. But when you bring it to enterprise, it's all about productivity in the legal space, the finance space, the operations space. And this large language model accelerates that set of capabilities.
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Host2:56
Antonio, what I think a lot of investors are trying to figure out here in these early innings of AI is how much of this AI spending in terms of capital expenditures is incremental, or how much of it is taken away from other tech budgets, maybe IT budgets for example. What's your experience so far?
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Antonio Neri3:14
Yeah Paul, I will say AI has a life cycle from training to fine-tuning to inferencing. Most of the action in the last five quarters or so, since we went through this hype, has been on the training side. These are companies that build large language models now exceeding a trillion parameters, and they need a lot of computer power to keep training and retraining the model to reduce the cost of those models, but also to make it more accurate so you can trust it. Enterprises are in the early stages, and I don't think they're going to build the models themselves. They're going to take a model, they're going to give context to the model with their data, in a location where they can afford it. Honestly, I think that's the reason why GreenLake is so important – as a service model, you only pay for what you consume versus outlaying tens of millions of dollars of capex up front. And the value comes from the inferencing where you deploy the model where the data is generated, so you can actually deliver the outcome, whether it's processing video surveillance or in the manufacturing floor to automate processes. This is where we are in the early stages, and I think that's going to be one of the biggest growth areas in 24 and 25.
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Host4:30
Antonio, you just reported earnings, you took your four-year guidance down. That was in part due to the networking business leading to that miss, and that was one of your better performing businesses last year. What's changed for you in that business?
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Antonio Neri4:44
You know, it's a little bit the success we have had. In the last two years we raised our revenues in the networking business by $2 billion, we took share from Cisco, and we have an amazing portfolio. I just came back from Mobile World Congress, you can see the use cases of inferencing at the edge of the network, for example the monetization of 5G and private 5G. But what's going on now is customers are digesting the last two years purchases, which were very significant. In fact, we grew over 40% year over year. And so this comes back, but this is why the merger with Juniper in the networking space is going to be a terrific addition to our portfolio and a value creation for us going forward.
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Host5:28
We have time for one more question. I've just got to go back. Folks, full disclosure: I'm going to redo it as a book of the summer. "Chip Wars," Chris Miller's fabulous book. Antonio, Seymour Cray was with Control Data and all that, and he made a wonder computer of my childhood out of Wisconsin and Minnesota. After three mergers, Silicon Graphics and all, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which people think of as stogy, picks up one of the magic names in 2019 in computers. What are you going to do with Cray?
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Antonio Neri6:03
An amazing company, an amazing company that changed the landscape of computing. Both Cray and SGI (Silicon Graphics) are part of our server business delivering these amazing systems we call supercomputing. To give a sense, those systems today are deploying at the Department of Energy and they have many coming online. Our goal is to use the system to solve some of the biggest challenges: to design better engines, more sustainable solutions in life sciences and climate research, sustainability. So this is why we made the investment. I think I will say, Tom, what people misunderstood is when we bought Cray we bought a company that had silicon and software, and we were able to turn that into a capability that solved these challenges. That's why we are excited about it.
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Host6:55
We're out of time. Antonio Neri, you got to come to New York, you got to come in our studio. I need to show you my HP 12C, Mr. Neri, with HPE, the wonderful follow-on of all the work at Hewlett-Packard.