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As its opening salvo ahead of next week’s MWC 2026, the world’s biggest mobile technology show, HPE has announced two AI-native routers for service providers. And judging by the fact the email announcing this said “HPE to launch router that leapfrogs Cisco”, we can clearly see which rival is in its sights.
“More than ever, HPE is committed to helping [service providers] lead in the AI era by building intelligent, next-generation networks that can support complex operations, rising data traffic, and the transformative capabilities of AI,” said Rami Rahim, President and General Manager, Networking, HPE. Prior to HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks last year, he had been CEO of Juniper for a decade.
“With high-performing infrastructure; simplified ease of management across compute, storage, and networking; and built-in security, HPE is helping customers virtualize and modernize their networks, simplify operations, and create new, higher-value services and advanced AI capabilities,” Rahim added. Clearly simplifying sentences isn’t so high on his agenda.
Two new lines of AI-native routers sit at the heart of this announcement. Both are built on the Juniper Express 5 ASIC, which HPE claims delivers a 49% boost in power efficiency compared to the previous generation.
First up, Juniper PTX12000 modular routers. These enable “network operators to scale AI and cloud traffic without repeated infrastructure redesigns”, claims HPE. The key: 800G port density on 1.6T-ready platforms.
Operators can scale the platform “up to 345.6T with the 8-slot PTX12008 and 518.4T with the 12-slot PTX12012, enabling seamless capacity expansion while preserving architectural consistency and reducing latency, power consumption, and costs”, HPE claims.
Next, Juniper PTX10002 fixed form routers. HPE says these will deliver “high-density routing in a compact 2RU footprint for AI network fabrics.
“With 28.8T or 14.4T of throughput and flexible multi-rate 100G, 400G, and 800G port options, the expanded portfolio enables efficient scaling of AI clusters and WAN connectivity, while giving customers the flexibility to optimize space, power, and port density as AI and cloud traffic grows.”
In addition, HPE says the Juniper Routing Director is “now agentic-AI ready”. This means businesses can connect their own “AI copilots to quickly fix WAN routing issues and simplify ongoing operations”, HPE claims.
There is a clear emphasis on AI infrastructure for HPE at MWC, which is unsurprising given that this was one of the key reasons it bought Juniper Networks. And analysts appear to agree that it has an advantage here compared to incumbents such as Cisco.
“As AI reshapes traffic patterns and drives new uplink, latency, and capacity demands, HPE’s leadership in high-performance routing, switching, AI-native automation, telco cloud architectures, and security ensures operators are equipped for the next era of AI-driven connectivity,” said Ray Mota, CEO and Principal Analyst, ACG Research.
He added: “HPE delivers the architectural and operational foundation service providers need to fully participate in the AI value chain, resulting in a differentiated ability to offer secure, autonomous, on-demand digital services at scale.”
In addition to showing network operators how they can add revenue using AI services on its platform, HPE says it will “provide insight on how customers can prepare their data centers for the demands of AI with the latest turnkey private cloud solutions for AI”.
MWC Barcelona 2026 begins on Monday 2 March and ends on Thursday 6 March. Look out for further TechFinitive coverage direct from the showfloor next week.
