Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the younger half of the original Hewlett-Packard. It was created in Palo Alto on November 1, 2015, when HP split into two public companies. HPE took the servers, storage, networking and services businesses and set up its headquarters on Hanover Street in Stanford Research Park. Within two years it had announced it was leaving. By 2022 it was settled in a new campus near Houston.

This profile covers HPE's short Palo Alto chapter, the string of headquarters moves that followed and what happened to the Hanover Street campus. For the eight decades of Hewlett-Packard history before the split, read our Hewlett-Packard profile.

The 2015 split

On October 6, 2014, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would divide into two companies. The split took effect on November 1, 2015. The structure was unusual. The original Hewlett-Packard Company renamed itself HP Inc. and kept the personal computer and printing businesses, the stock price history and the old ticker symbol. It spun off Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a new company with its own ticker, HPE.

At the time of the split, HPE's revenue was slightly less than HP Inc.'s. Meg Whitman, who had led Hewlett-Packard since 2011, became HPE's chief executive. The company's full legal name is Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company. It dropped the hyphen that had always joined "Hewlett" and "Packard."

3000 Hanover Street, 2015 to the late 2010s

HPE began life headquartered at 3000 Hanover Street in Palo Alto. The address was not new to the family. By the 2000s Hewlett-Packard's corporate address had been 3000 Hanover Street, a short drive from 1501 Page Mill Road, where the company first moved in 1960. In the split, HP Inc. kept 1501 Page Mill Road and HPE took Hanover Street.

Like everything in the research park, the campus sits on Stanford land held under a long ground lease. It lies between Page Mill Road and Hillview Avenue, among the low office buildings that made the park famous. Our guide to Stanford Research Park explains how the leases work.

A busy first two years

HPE reshaped itself quickly. In March 2017 it merged its Enterprise Services business with Computer Sciences Corporation to form DXC Technology, a change that affected about 100,000 employees. In September 2017 it spun off its software business into a merger with Micro Focus. It also bought companies, including Silicon Graphics International in 2016 and Nimble Storage in 2017. A much smaller company was left at the end, focused on servers, storage, networking and services.

Leaving Palo Alto

In November 2017 HPE announced it would move its headquarters to the Santa Clara offices of Aruba, a networking company it had bought in 2015. It also planned to sell the Hanover Street building. The same month Whitman announced she would step down. Antonio Neri became president and CEO on February 1, 2018.

HPE later operated its headquarters from San Jose. Wikipedia shows an HPE campus in San Jose. The company's December 2020 announcement described the move to Texas as a relocation from San Jose.

The move to Texas

On December 1, 2020, HPE announced that it would move its headquarters to the Houston area. Neri explained the decision in a company blog post the same day. HPE said San Jose would remain a major hub for its Bay Area staff.

The move happened in two steps:

1. December 2021 to April 2022. HPE's headquarters was on the former Compaq campus in northwest Harris County, near State Highway 249 and Louetta Road. Hewlett-Packard had acquired the site with Compaq in 2002. The old campus had flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which was one reason Neri wanted a new building.
2. April 2022 onward. HPE moved into a new campus in Springwoods Village in Spring, Texas, designed by the architecture firm Pickard Chilton. The Houston Business Journal covered its grand opening that April. HPE sold the old Compaq complex the same month.

Wikipedia notes that the Spring campus lies in a limited purpose annexation area of the City of Houston, so HPE can describe itself as a Houston company. We found no later headquarters moves through late 2026.

What happened to Hanover Street

The Palo Alto campus did not stay empty for long. In 2021 Tesla agreed to lease about 325,000 square feet of the former HP headquarters site on Hanover Street. On February 22, 2023, Elon Musk and Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the campus would become Tesla's global engineering headquarters. Musk framed it as a handoff from the company that helped found Silicon Valley to Tesla. Our Tesla profile covers that chapter.

That makes 3000 Hanover Street one of the few addresses in Palo Alto to have served as headquarters for three well known names: Hewlett-Packard, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and, for engineering, Tesla.

Telling HP Inc. and HPE apart

Visitors often mix up the two halves of the old company. A quick guide:

• HP Inc. makes personal computers and printers. It kept the original company's stock history and ticker symbol. It is still headquartered at 1501 Page Mill Road in Palo Alto.
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise sells servers, storage, networking and cloud services to businesses and governments. It trades under the ticker HPE and is headquartered near Houston.
• The HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue belongs to HP Inc. Both companies trace their roots to it.

Timeline

HPE today

HPE is now a business technology company focused on servers, storage, networking, hybrid cloud services under the GreenLake name and supercomputing. It bought the supercomputer maker Cray in 2019. On July 2, 2025, after a settlement with the Department of Justice, it completed its $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks, the Sunnyvale networking company. HPE introduced a new logo in June 2025.

For Palo Alto, HPE's departure was one of a string of headline moves. Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver in 2020 and Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin in 2021. In each case the Bay Area work did not vanish. HPE kept a large San Jose hub and Tesla came back to Hanover Street. Our guide to Palo Alto companies puts these moves side by side.

Frequently asked questions