HPE CFO Myers: Private cloud cut our AI token spend

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CFO Marie Myers said the company cut token costs 60% with its private cloud relative to what it would have spent in the public cloud.

Speaking at an investment conference, Myers was asked about on-premise AI deployments and hybrid deployments. Myers said HPE sees a larger total addressable market due to its hybrid cloud knowhow.

"We've always been a company that participated in the hybrid space. And it is very much our DNA and legacy in terms of inference and on-prem," said Myers. "There are very compelling use case environments, not just based on the cases themselves, but also in the economics."

The private AI cloud deployment comments from Myers follows what the CFO said about HPE's internal AI efforts. Myers said the company can continue to improve margins AI-enabled process optimization effort called Catalyst. For HPE, private cloud deployments and open models go together.

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She said:

"We have expanded both our AI and operational simplification efforts across the enterprise. HPE is now deploying an internal agent AI platform built on our own private cloud AI, open source, and open weight models, leveraging intelligent routing that sends each workload request to the most cost-effective AI model. Routine tasks stay on-premise while frontier models are reserved for the most complex work."

Myers' comments seem to confirm a report from Deloitte on how CFOs are taking on a bigger role in AI projects due to governance and cost controls. According to Deloitte's Finance Trends 2027 Report, 54% of finance leaders are overseeing cross-enterprise AI and technology capital allocation and 48% control oversight of AI.