For the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, the challenge was not only sporting or organizational. It was infrastructural: a core business of an event generating real-time signals, data, and services for hundreds of millions of users. With over 3,000 athletes participating in 116 events across 22,000 square kilometers, the organizational machinery requires more than a traditional wireless platform: it demands an AI-native, scalable, resilient, and secure network ecosystem.
The Milano Cortina 2026 Foundation chose to entrust the creation of this digital backbone to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the official Network Equipment Hardware Partner of the event. “The Games are unique sporting moments happening live on-site and broadcast worldwide. Our network needs top-level performance and stability, from the data center to every single access point,” says Giuseppe Civale, director of ICT Infrastructure and Venue Technologies of the Games. The infrastructure—based on AI-native technologies and advanced automation—must support one million connected devices, deliver 8K streaming for over 200 broadcasters and around 2 billion viewers, as well as mission-critical services such as timing, telemetry, scoring, and logistics.
“Old networks are no longer enough,” says Claudio Bassoli, CEO of HPE Italy. “We need security at every layer to monitor millions of interactions per second; self-configuring networks; AI agents for telemetry, security, and power; and above all, an optimal experience for every digital transaction.” The technological design is not just a Wi-Fi upgrade. It is a “self-driving” network, capable of self-configuring, self-optimizing, and self-healing thanks to embedded AI, using tools like HPE Mist and the AI assistant Marvis, which leverage telemetry and natural language to anticipate congestion and anomalies.
From an operational perspective, adopting AI-native AIOps made it possible to centrally manage a topology comprising over 4,900 access points, 1,500 switches, more than 70 routers, 50 firewalls, and over 30 smart session routers. These nodes are not just data gateways but intelligent agents capable of reacting in real time to traffic peaks, prioritizing media flows, and adjusting access policies based on predictive models.
The scale of the event has served as a testing ground for a digital transformation many companies face today: the network is no longer a passive infrastructure but a performance and security engine. In business contexts where data analytics, customer experience, and edge computing are strategic, an AI-native network reduces operational costs and increases the value of generated data.
“This is not just connectivity: it’s the creation of an ecosystem enabling performance, security, and scalability in one solution. It is an enabler for athletes, media, fans, and the event’s organizational machine,” adds Bassoli, emphasizing that latency, resilience, and user experience are measurable variables that determine the overall quality of the platform.
From HPE’s positioning perspective, Milano-Cortina 2026 was a high-visibility use case that encapsulates the company’s own transformation journey. In recent years, HPE has focused on AI-driven networking technologies, strengthened by the integration of Juniper and financial results that see networking increasingly central in generating recurring revenue and free cash flow. Practically, adopting an AI-native network for an event spread over thousands of kilometers involves automation not only for device provisioning and control but also for proactive digital threat mitigation and sensitive data management. With 8K broadcast streams requiring extremely high throughput and end-to-end guaranteed service quality, intrinsic security at every network layer becomes both a compliance and performance factor.
Viewed in this way, technological investment can be considered a strategic asset rather than a cost: ensuring uptime, data protection, and real-time continuity of digital services is essential for the reputation and operational efficiency of any major event, as well as for companies aiming to compete through AI adoption and digital experience. The challenge—for HPE and modern enterprise ICT teams alike—is twofold: achieve real-time performance at large scale and do so sustainably, reusing installed resources and implementing automated operational processes that reduce human intervention at the lowest management levels.
In an event like the Olympic Games, where network failures can result in data loss, broadcast delays, or critical service outages, the AI-native network is not an “advanced broadband” but an essential digital engine. For HPE, and for tomorrow’s enterprise use cases, this infrastructure represents an operational model for meeting advanced networking demands beyond the sports arena.
