HPE and NVIDIA Bet Big on Agentic AI, Building the Autonomous Enterprise

LAS VEGAS, NV – June 16, 2026 – As the artificial intelligence landscape rapidly evolves beyond content generation, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA today unveiled a significant expansion of their strategic partnership, aimed squarely at powering the next wave of business transformation: the 'agentic enterprise.' At its HPE Discover 2026 conference, HPE announced a suite of new hardware, software, and security innovations designed to help businesses deploy and manage autonomous AI systems—or 'AI agents'—at scale, with a critical focus on security, governance, and data sovereignty.

The announcements center on enhancing the HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA, a co-engineered, turnkey solution that promises to simplify the complex journey from AI experimentation to full-scale production. The collaboration seeks to provide a comprehensive, private cloud-based infrastructure for a future where AI doesn't just respond to commands but proactively pursues goals, automates complex workflows, and makes decisions with limited human oversight.

“As AI becomes more autonomous, organizations need a new architecture to run it securely, govern it responsibly, and scale it economically,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “Across networking, servers, storage and software, HPE is delivering full-stack AI solutions with NVIDIA that build the foundation for agentic enterprises.”

The Dawn of the Autonomous Enterprise

Agentic AI represents a paradigm shift from the generative AI models that have dominated recent headlines. While generative AI creates content, agentic AI uses these models as a 'brain' to perceive its environment, reason through problems, and execute multi-step tasks to achieve specific goals. These are not just passive tools but active participants in business processes, capable of using software, calling APIs, and collaborating with human colleagues.

The market for these systems is on the verge of explosive growth. Industry analysts forecast the number of active AI agents to surge from millions to billions by the end of the decade, executing trillions of tasks annually. However, this potential is tempered by significant enterprise challenges. According to one industry expert, many companies remain stuck in pilot mode, lacking the “orchestration maturity, governance structures, and nonhuman identity controls” needed to run autonomous systems safely at scale.

Key hurdles include ensuring data quality, managing security risks from 'rogue' agents, and maintaining compliance with complex regulatory frameworks. It is this high-stakes environment that HPE and NVIDIA aim to address, providing the guardrails necessary for enterprises to unleash autonomous AI with confidence.

Forging the Full-Stack AI Factory

The centerpiece of the announcement is the enhancement of HPE Private Cloud AI, a turnkey solution that integrates HPE's enterprise infrastructure with NVIDIA's powerful AI stack. The deep co-engineering between the two tech giants is designed to deliver a seamless, high-performance platform optimized for the unique demands of agentic workloads.

“Every layer of the computing stack is being reinvented for the age of AI agents,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “Together with HPE, we are building AI factories for this new era of computing — powered by NVIDIA Vera CPUs, accelerated infrastructure, and secure AI software — to help enterprises transform their data into intelligent action.”

Key innovations include:

• Next-Generation Compute: The upcoming HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 server, featuring the NVIDIA Vera CPU, is purpose-built for agentic AI and high-performance data processing. This integrated CPU-GPU architecture promises to eliminate data bottlenecks and accelerate the complex reasoning and learning loops that characterize agentic systems.

• AI-Ready Data Infrastructure: To tackle the data bottleneck, HPE is upgrading its storage and data management offerings. The HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 and HPE Data Fabric Software are designed to transform vast pools of unstructured enterprise data into AI-ready pipelines, with claims of dramatically reducing token response times and boosting throughput.

• An Operating System for Agents: The platform will integrate NVIDIA's Agent Toolkit, a suite of software that acts as an operating system for AI agents. This includes NVIDIA Nemotron open reasoning models, which serve as the agent's 'brain,' and tools like NVIDIA NemoClaw and OpenShell that enable developers to efficiently build, monitor, and enforce policies on AI agents.

Securing the Autonomous Frontier

Perhaps the most critical aspect of the HPE-NVIDIA announcement is its robust focus on security and governance. As AI agents gain autonomy, the potential for error or malicious action becomes a primary concern for risk and compliance officers. The new offerings introduce a multi-layered security framework to build trust into the AI factory.

At the hardware level, HPE is integrating NVIDIA Confidential Computing across its AI Factory solutions. This technology creates secure, encrypted enclaves that protect AI models and sensitive data even while they are being processed. This 'in-use' protection is vital for meeting strict data sovereignty requirements and complying with regulations like GDPR, CMMC, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, as it ensures data remains shielded from the underlying infrastructure.

At the software level, HPE is deploying its Zerto Software in a novel role: monitoring for and recovering from rogue agent actions. Traditionally a disaster recovery tool, Zerto's continuous data protection capabilities are being adapted to identify anomalous agent behavior and provide a 'rewind' function, allowing enterprises to roll back to a clean state before a rogue action caused damage. This provides a crucial safety net for deploying autonomous systems into production environments.

A High-Stakes Play for the Enterprise Market

With this move, HPE is positioning itself not just as an infrastructure provider but as a strategic enabler of the autonomous enterprise. The emphasis on a private cloud solution differentiates it from hyperscale cloud providers like AWS and Google, appealing directly to organizations with stringent data sovereignty, security, and control requirements. The deep, full-stack integration with NVIDIA provides a compelling alternative to building a complex AI environment from disparate components.

However, the path forward is not without challenges. The cost of such advanced infrastructure can be substantial, and the market is intensely competitive. Furthermore, the success of agentic AI depends not only on technology but also on the availability of skilled talent and the development of clear business use cases. HPE's challenge will be to help customers navigate these complexities and move beyond experimentation to unlock the transformative value of autonomous AI.