If you take a look at a typical AI data center, maybe only around 10 to 15% of the total investment in that data center is going to be networking. But it is a true force multiplier. That investment is going to determine how much you're going to get out of your billions of dollars that you put into compute. The 65 is on the road here at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Daniel Newman here, excited for a great conversation that I'm going to have with someone that I've had here on the show before, Rami Rahim. Rami is the EVP president and general manager at HPE. Rami, welcome back. It's great to be sitting with you.
It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Daniel.
Yeah, congratulations. It's been a big year. Actually, between last year at this time, I think I sat at this event with Antonio and I was talking to Antonio. I kind of took him aside. I said, 'You're going to get this thing done.'
And he, you know, at the time, he couldn't say a lot because of everything going on. But anyway, it was very quickly thereafter discovered last year, I think, that the news came through that this deal was getting done literally days after.
So, we were getting ready to make a big announcement at this show that unfortunately didn't happen in time. So we missed it literally by days. This is my first HPE Discover Las Vegas.
Yeah. Well, there you go. Well, were you here?
Um, I was at HPE Discover Barcelona, our European customers.
Okay. Well, let's talk networking, right? There's been so much attention over the last year on the infrastructure buildout. A lot of focus has been on compute and compute has been a big part of HPE's portfolio. Having said that, we're starting to see the full stack, right? Whether it's these rack scale systems from partners like Nvidia or it's just the conversation about where are constraints throughout the supply. It's not just compute anymore, it's compute, it's memory, it's networking, it's storage, it's energy, it's everything. But networking is starting to become more and more in focus of how companies are going to deliver the potential around AI. But even just the HPE Juniper partnership now, fully merged.
Yes. Um, what are you seeing since this deal has been done? That is really showing that this was a great deal. For both companies and that this combination is going to deliver value faster for your customers.
Right. It's a great question. For the first part of your question, there is no doubt that there is an immense amount of focus and energy right now on networking. I wouldn't say it's emerging. I mean, we are living it right now. Many of our biggest customers, the AI cloud builders are really thinking about three things: space, power, and connectivity. And it's interesting because if you take a look at a typical AI data center, maybe only around 10 to 15% of the total investment in that data center is going to be networking. But it is a true force multiplier. That investment is going to determine how much you're going to get out of your billions of dollars that you put into compute. If you're running your network at 50% capacity, having blocking issues, congestion issues, guess what? That investment in compute is just not going to live up to expectations. So networking has become incredibly important again. It's essential infrastructure for the AI era. To the second part of your question, Daniel, about the integration, it's going great. Honestly, it's a lot of work. Integrating two large companies is not easy, but we are ahead of schedule. We told ourselves as we work through this integration process, we are not going to let ourselves get distracted from what's important, which is innovation and supporting our customers. We've been doing all of that and the integration work. You can see the innovation engine since the beginning of the close of the acquisition. It's amazing. It's honestly awesome to see.
Yeah, it is great. And by the way, when you say that 10 to 15%, it's probably important to also call out for everyone out there how much the cost per gigawatt that 10 to 15% is going to be a bigger and bigger number because every part of that build that number is growing, right? I mean, a few years ago, I think we were looking at something like $5 billion to $10 per gigawatt and then a year and a half ago, we were talking about maybe $20 to $30. Now the consensus has it at $50 and I think Jensen got on stage and said this could hit $80 to $100. So all those parts including yours, the numbers are getting bigger.
The numbers are getting bigger primarily because the demand is getting a lot bigger. I mean, put the supply chain issues aside, the innovation and the process node advancement is allowing us to actually achieve far more bits per second per watt in networking and that's allowing us to build far bigger data centers today. And of course we are capitalizing on that right now in networking, moving more data. Let's face it, it's generating more tokens and that is what we need to move the data faster and generate those tokens.
So we hear a lot about like AI for networks, networks for AI. Where are you seeing demand? Because it's everywhere, right? Demand is everywhere. But where are you seeing it in your business? Where is it growing the fastest? Where is that innovation being adopted most rapidly?
Both of those key areas of opportunity are important to us and both are massive opportunities. Starting with AI for networks. This is just a new mode of operating networks across every single layer of the network from the campus to branch to data centers, wide area networking, security, you name it. The old way of operating networks, manual configuration, manual optimization, manual diagnosis of issues when they occur just doesn't cut it in the AI era. And so we need to leverage artificial intelligence to crush the cost of managing networks and to delight the end customer. I truly believe that we at HPE networking have made the most progress of any other technology company in that space. Our solutions across Aruba Central and Mist are just awesome and honestly light years ahead of anybody else. The other opportunity you mentioned is networks for AI. This just goes back to what we were talking about. There is an insatiable appetite for the production of tokens and that means you need infrastructure and networking is such a key piece of this. One thing that we have the ability to do now in HPE networking is not just the scale across routing solutions or the scale out Ethernet solutions that connect different racks together, but also the scale up solutions that we're developing in partnership with companies like AMD with a product called Helios, where the network is an open Ethernet fabric, first of its kind to connect GPUs together. That's a brand new opportunity that has come about because of the combination of Juniper and HPE.
And by the way, I feel like I got to keep putting these exclamation points at the end of your sentences. But that's a huge... We've got a forecast at Futurum where we're looking at the AMD market share on GPUs. And first of all, we got I think it was $10 trillion of capex between now and 2030. You've got market share of more than a trillion dollar annual spend on these rack scale systems coming up and HPE. So one of the big differences, and of course you have a great partnership with Nvidia, but one of the big differences with Helios is Helios is taking a bit more of a partnership approach.
And you guys are deep in the guts.
