SUNNYVALE, California – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) scored a $1.2 billion deal with neocloud Vultr, the first tied to HPE’s recently launched AMD Helios AI Rack system and a deal that HPE Networking executive Rami Rahim said shows how HPE’s portfolio breadth is helping its networking business.

The deal calls for Vultr to deploy HPE’s AMD Helios-powered AI Rack at cloud data center locations in the U.S. That deployment is set to support service provider and enterprise demand for model training and inferencing workloads in their AI data centers.

HPE got into the AMD Helio game late last year, work that involved a collaboration with Broadcom for what was claimed to be the first commercial deployment of an AMD Helios-based AI rack-scale system. The architecture is built on purpose-designed HPE Juniper Networking hardware and software, Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 networking chip, and AMD’s flagship MI450 series GPU.

While the platform is officially part of HPE’s AI Data Center Solutions portfolio, it does include six HPE Juniper Networking QFX5252 scale-up Ethernet switch trays per rack, connecting 72 GPUs with high-bandwidth, low-latency, standards-based Ethernet.

Rahim told an audience at a HPE Networking investor conference this week that the Helio platform opens deal “an entirely new addressable market in networking, either by selling our AMD Helios networking trays as part of an HPE integrated rack solution or independently to other solution providers. We believe Helios represents more than a billion-dollar networking opportunity over the next two years, with networking tray orders having already exceeded $200 million.”

The Vultr deal does builds on years-long work between Vultr and Juniper Networks, which included efforts in late 2024 that had AMD, Broadcom, and Juniper Networks providing equipment to Vultr’s Chicago cloud data center region, but Rahim said HPE played a big part in securing the latest agreement.

“It'd be very difficult for Juniper to do that on a standalone basis, but having access to the partnerships HPE has, the technology across liquid cooling, full-rack architectures, gave us that capability,” Rahim said.

New neocloud opportunities

Rahim also noted the Vultr deal highlights the vendor’s growing neocloud opportunity, explaining that neoclouds, “typically they are very technical, so you do have to engage with them in a very technical way, and obviously the merit of our networking matters a lot.”

“But here the opportunity to go in there with full-rack solutions increases because many neoclouds value the simplicity of buying a complete system and buying from a single technology provider,” Rahim continued. “Our win with Vultr … would be an example of that. It's the full portfolio that we're bringing to bear to win this, which, again, speaks to the revenue synergy opportunity that exists between Juniper and HPE. It would have been much more difficult to compete for the broader neocloud and sovereign cloud opportunity as a standalone company.”

Vultr recently found itself in Gartner’s “challengers” box in the analyst firm’s most recent quad-ranking of cloud AI infrastructure providers.

Gartner labeled the Florida-based neocloud as appealing to enterprises wanting cost-optimized cloud AI infrastructure along with other cloud-native services and flexible pricing, and a particular notice of it providing access to both AMD and Nvidia hardware. However, there were issues found around support response and operational maturity, suggesting some users indicated that customer support times for urgent, complex issues “can occasionally be slow.”