HPE bought loss-making Cray and made its name the flagship of supercomputing again

Cray Research defined supercomputing in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 2019 the Seattle-area company was a shadow of that: a repeatedly loss-making specialist squeezed between cloud giants and commodity clusters, even as demand for high-performance computing accelerated. In May 2019, Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed to buy Cray for $1.3 billion - $35 a share, a $5.19 premium over the prior close. Analysts told TechCrunch that Cray 'has been losing money for some time' but held valuable interconnect intellectual property and deep relationships with government labs.

HPE completed the acquisition in September 2019. Rather than folding Cray into a generic server line, HPE put the Cray name on its flagship supercomputer portfolio: the HPE Cray EX and XD systems, built around Cray's Slingshot interconnect and the Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin operations where Seymour Cray built his first machines.

The revival showed up on the industry's scoreboard. Frontier, an HPE Cray EX system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, took first place on the TOP500 ranking in June 2022 as the world's first recognized exascale machine and held the crown for a fifth consecutive time by June 2024 at 1.206 exaflops. By then Aurora at Argonne (1.012 exaflops), Europe's LUMI in Finland and the Alps system in Switzerland were also HPE Cray EX machines clustered near the top of the list.

HPE Cray EX powered Frontier, TOP500 number one for a fifth straight time by June 2024 at 1.206 exaflops, and filled much of the top ten with Aurora, LUMI and Alps.

Cray's interconnect and systems IP was exactly what an enterprise vendor needed for exascale contracts, but it could not be monetized at Cray's standalone scale.

HPE already sold the servers and services around government supercomputing bids; Cray completed the stack rather than duplicating it.

The Cray name still carried unmatched credibility with national labs, so HPE branded the flagship line with it instead of burying the brand.

Exascale procurement was moving from bespoke one-offs to a repeatable product line - a transition only a scaled player could fund.

A legendary engineering brand can be worth more inside a scale player than standalone: keep the name carrying fifty years of credibility, point it at computing's fastest-growing workload.

HPE invested $22 million in the former Cray facility in Wisconsin for supercomputer manufacturing, and the HPE Cray line became the backbone of Western exascale procurement - Frontier in the US, LUMI in Finland, Aurora at Argonne and Alps in Switzerland. Frontier kept the TOP500 number one spot through 2024, and the Cray brand, extinct as an independent company, is once again the name the world's fastest machines carry.