SoftBank Acquires Ampere for $6.5B in Cash

SoftBank Group dropped some big news on Wednesday, announcing they're set to snap up Ampere Computing, a chip designer started by ex-Intel bigwig Renee James. They're shelling out a cool $6.5 billion in cash for this move, aiming to beef up their AI infrastructure game.

Once the deal's done, which should happen sometime in the latter half of 2025, Ampere will be flying under the SoftBank flag as a fully owned subsidiary.

Carlyle and Oracle, who've been Ampere's main backers, are ready to cash out their shares in this Santa Clara, California-based startup. SoftBank's statement says Carlyle's got a hefty 59.65% stake, while Oracle's holding onto 32.27%. Ampere's got a team of 1,000 semiconductor engineers on board.

Back in 2021, SoftBank was eyeing a smaller piece of Ampere, which was valued at around $8 billion at the time, according to Bloomberg.

SoftBank's already the biggest shareholder in Arm Holdings, and Ampere's been busy building server chips using the ARM compute platform. This makes them pretty tight partners. (Remember, SoftBank bought British chip designer Arm for $32 billion back in 2016, and it went public in 2023.) Ampere's got a solid customer base, including big names like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, and Tencent, plus companies like HPE and Supermicro.

SoftBank says grabbing Ampere will boost their chops in AI and computing, and help speed up their growth plans. This latest deal comes hot on the heels of a bunch of other moves by the Japanese tech giant over the past few months, like teaming up with OpenAI to create something called "Cristal intelligence" for advanced enterprise AI. They've also thrown money into the Stargate AI infrastructure project, which is setting up data centers for OpenAI across the U.S., and they've bought an old Sharp factory in Japan.

"The future of artificial super intelligence needs some serious computing power," said Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group Corp's chairman and CEO. "Ampere's know-how in semiconductors and high-performance computing is gonna help us push this vision forward and show how committed we are to AI innovation in the U.S."

Ampere was kicked off in 2017 by James, who used to work at Intel and Carlyle, and even sat on Oracle's board. They started out focusing on cloud-native computing but have since branched out into sustainable AI compute.

"We're all about advancing AI, and we're stoked to join forces with SoftBank Group and their tech company lineup," said James. "This is a huge win for our team, and we're excited to keep pushing our AmpereOne roadmap for high-performance Arm processors and AI."