AI On The Green: HPE Creates Tech ‘Epicenter’ At The 2025 Ryder Cup

Plus, a few takeaways for midmarket IT leaders from HPE’s undertaking.

(Michael Cole, chief technology officer of the European Tour Group and Ryder Cup Europe)

HPE has partnered with the 2025 Ryder Cup team to deliver what one HPE executive called “the epicenter of technology.”

With 250,000 people expected at the three-day event taking place Sept. 26-28 at the Bethpage Black Golf Course in Bethpage, New York, along with a host of VIPs including President Donald Trump and tens of thousands of network users, HPE strived to create a unified connectivity, data insight, and fan interactive experience for the widely viewed sporting event.

To do so was no small feat. The implementation involved bringing in fiber optic cables, some of which were strewn throughout treetops on the golf course, 170 HPE Aruba Networking CX switches, 650 HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 6E access points, and 25 HPE Aruba Networking UXI sensors.

“Every digital signage, all the point-of-sale systems, the bag scanners for your bags, your tags, the Wi-Fi network ... we’re actually running the back haul for the cellular systems. There’s temporary cell sites around here,” said Jeff Weaver, senior distinguished technologist, office of the wireless CTO, HPE, at a press event featuring several HPE executives.

(Bethpage Black Golf Course, 2025 Ryder Cup)

“This is the first time we’ve actually taken private cloud AI and coupled it with a network where the network AI is feeding the AI engine,” Weaver said.

The hardware is managed with HPE Aruba Networking Central. Other software components include the Connected Intelligence Center, which features the Operational Intelligence Dashboard.

The dashboard is a platform for Ryder Cup staff and provides data visualization to aid in making operational decisions. It leverages the HPE Private Cloud AI which HPE co-designed with Nvidia. The Intelligence Dashboard offers a trove of real-time data insights on ticketing, weather, merchandise and concession sales, GPS-based golf cart tracking, spectator queue monitoring, network performance data, and IP camera streams around the course via 67 AI-enabled cameras.

(Bethpage Black Golf Course, 2025 Ryder Cup)

HPE also launched an Ops AI Assistant just for the 2025 Ryder Cup that serves as a conversational customer service tool.

Adding to the complexity: the infrastructure had to be designed to be temporary and taken down quickly and efficiently after the tournament in 48 hours after it ends.

“We’re bringing in a small city,” said James Robertson, who is HPE’s vice president and chief technology officer, Industry Strategy, and chief technology officer, media, entertainment, hospitality and sports.

HPE’s experience offers some lessons midmarket IT leaders can use in planning their own AI and digital transformation strategies.

4 Key Takeaways For Midmarket IT Leaders From HPE’s 2025 Ryder Cup Project

Focus on creating the right experience for your customers (end users).

“How do I create the right experience to serve my guests, my consumers wherever they are?” Robertson said. “Everything from delivering food and beverage right to their seat. To give them the play-by-play analytics on the screen right in front of them.”

For midmarket leaders, the end users in an organization are essentially IT’s customers. When planning any upgrades or deploying new technology, it’s critical to take a deep dive into how an upgrade or implementation can benefit or frustrate end users in the organization.

(Bethpage Black Golf Course, 2025 Ryder Cup)

Get the details of a new deployment or upgrade right from the start.

Another HPE executive spoke about assessing a venue before setting up any tech infrastructure and how poorly done prior tech installs could impede new projects.

While looking into another venue for a Wi-Fi upgrade, Scott Wiest, vice president and chief technology officer, HPE Fellow, Global Sales, said that “the [venue’s] Wi-Fi was unusable. Integrators that came in kind of cookie-cuttered [the Wi-Fi install] and just slapped it in.”

Wiest said that when surveying venues like stadiums it’s important to take several aspects into consideration.

“There’s a lot of steel. There’s a lot of interference. If the pre-work’s not done right, that’s why you’ll see brand new stadiums with terrible Wi-Fi,” he said.

In some cases, “the back haul is simply too old for a Taylor Swift concert,” Robertson said.

“You have a terrible experience right in, but the amount of money that it takes to retrofit,” Wiest added.

Whether it’s an expansive effort like HPE’s at the Ryder Cup, or upgrading a network in a midsize business, it’s important to take on any existing infrastructure issues before undergoing any new deployments or upgrades to avoid headaches (and expense) down the road.

Details and collaboration are very important in any deployment.

With all the hardware needed for the Ryder Cup project, “everything is pre-labeled when [the installers] dispatch them,” Weaver said about the networking hardware. “The installers go exactly where [a hardware device] is, and when we see it come online, we have confidence that it’s where it is. So, the process and the procedure here is really critical that we work together,” he said.

Taking time to detail all facets of a new installation or upgrade can make the job easier.

Reutilize your investments.

While HPE wouldn’t give a number as to the cost of its Ryder Cup tech project, Michael Cole, chief technology officer of the European Tour Group and Ryder Cup Europe, stressed the importance of reutilizing a significant investment.

“We believe in the avoidance of one-time use of technology,” Cole said and that the 2025 Ryder Cup project would be used for upcoming sporting events.

As to whether midmarket organizations have access to the technology used at this year’s Ryder Cup, Robertson said that “there’s nothing here that we’re doing at the course that we couldn’t work with another customer to deploy."

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with the corrected titles for James Robertson and Scott Wiest.