HPE’s Datacenter Networking Picture Comes Into Clearer Focus

A major technology company has integrated networking equipment from a recently acquired rival to create what it calls a "self-driving network" that uses artificial intelligence to automatically configure, optimize, and repair itself with minimal human involvement. The company embedded AI technology throughout its network systems, from cloud datacenters to edge locations, combining platforms and AI engines to provide automated troubleshooting that can resolve problems in minutes rather than hours or days. This matters because artificial intelligence workloads, particularly AI agents and inference tasks, generate significantly more network traffic than traditional tools and require different network performance characteristics, making the network layer critical to overall AI infrastructure performance. The shift reflects how both this company and its competitors view networking as foundational to supporting the emerging demands of large-scale AI deployment.