Hewlett Packard Enterprise → Juniper Networks
HPE's $14bn all-cash purchase of Juniper Networks doubled its networking business, but it closed only after the Justice Department sued and then settled — a settlement so disputed that a court did not approve it until August 2026, more than a year after the deal completed.
Completed only after HPE settled a DoJ suit by divesting Instant On and auctioning a licence to Juniper's Mist AI source code.
- Value
- $14B
- Announced
- January 2024
- Completed
- July 2025
- Sector
- Technology
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (United States)
- Target
- Juniper Networks (United States)
Why it mattered
HPE, already the owner of Aruba, wanted to shift its mix towards higher-growth, higher-margin networking. Juniper made routers, switches and firewalls, and had bought the wireless start-up Mist in 2019 for its AI software that runs Wi-Fi networks. On 9 January 2024 HPE agreed to pay $40 a share in cash, a 32% premium to the undisturbed price, for an equity value of about $14bn, backed by $14bn of committed term loans. It promised $450m of annual cost savings within three years and said networking would rise from about 18% of its revenue to about 31%, with Juniper's chief executive, Rami Rahim, running the combined business.
The European Union and the UK cleared the deal in 2024. The US did not: on 30 January 2025 the Justice Department sued, arguing that HPE and Cisco would together hold more than 70% of enterprise wireless networking and that HPE and Juniper were often the top two bidders for the same customers. On 27 June the parties settled. HPE agreed to sell its Instant On campus and branch business and to auction up to two licences to the source code of Juniper's Mist AI software; the court let the deal proceed on 30 June, and it closed on 2 July 2025.
What it left behind
The settlement became a political story. Roger Alford, a senior official in the antitrust division, was forced out and said publicly in August 2025 that, in his opinion, two senior aides to the attorney general had "perverted justice" in the case. Twelve states and the District of Columbia joined the court's review of the settlement; the judge refused in January 2026 to halt integration, and on 12 August 2026 found the settlement in the public interest and entered final judgment. Inside HPE, networking revenue more than doubled to $8.3bn in the nine months to July 2026, mainly because of Juniper, and the cost-savings target rose to at least $600m by fiscal 2028, needing about $800m of spending to reach. When a settlement is contested for how it was reached, not only for what it contains, the buyer can still close, but it integrates under an unapproved decree until the court has ruled.