The focus of this paper is to examine how and when technology adoption occurs over the stages of entrepreneurship. High-performance computing (HPC) includes infrastructure and applications that are used for complex computational problems and can involve supercomputers and linked clusters. HPC can contribute to industry and firm competitiveness, particularly for SMEs. Against this background, there remains a limited understanding of how and when technology adoption occurs over the stages of entrepreneurship. In addressing this deficit our exploratory study identifies how and when technology adoption occurs over the stages of entrepreneurship. Our contribution is twofold. First, we develop a taxonomy of HPC with respect to the how and when of technology adoption. Second, we identify three categories of technology adoption – emergent imitators, early adopters and growth assimilators across two stages of entrepreneurship – emergent and late-stage.