The UK is investigating HPE’s planned $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced an initial ‘Stage 1’ investigation into the proposed acquisition of Juniper Networks by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

HPE announced plans to amass Juniper Networks in January, a move aimed toward unifying their strengths in networking and IT infrastructure, which incorporates servers, storage, consulting services, routing, switching and security. As with almost every big deal today, the first motivation for the merger was to, in corporate parlance, “accelerate AI-driven innovation,” given the important thing role that cloud infrastructure plays within the burgeoning AI movement.

HPE said on the time that it might pay $40 per share, a 32% premium during the last closing price, for a complete value of $14 billion. A deal of this size was all the time prone to attract some regulatory scrutiny, and the CMA said it was within the early stages of assessing whether the deal was prone to “result in a significant lessening of competition in any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”

For now, the CMA is inviting comments from relevant industry stakeholders, with a deadline of July 3. The CMA will then have until August 14 to determine whether to maneuver to a proper “phase 2”.