SoftBank is buying Santa Clara, Calif.-based Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion in cash to help improve SoftBank’s AI future, both companies announced Thursday.
Ampere, founded in 2018, has about 1,000 chip engineers and is focused on designing energy-efficient processors used in cloud and AI. The purchase complements chip designs of Arm Holdings, a unit of SoftBank, which has recently seen record sales.
“Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the United States,” said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group, in a statement.
The all-cash deal is expected to close in second half of 2025.Ampere’s headquarters will remain in Santa Clara. SoftBank is based in Tokyo.
Renee James, founder and CEO of Ampere, said the purchase is a “fantastic outcome for our team and we are excited to drive forward our AmpereOne roadmap for high performance Arm processors and AI.”
In January, SoftBank announced the Stargate project to invest $500 billion over four years in AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US. Partners include Oracle, MGX, Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia. President Trump joined Son and others in making the Stargate announcement at the White House.
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Ampere will hold into its name as a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank and Ampere’s lead investors—Carlyle and Oracle—are selling their respective positions in Ampere.
One analyst said that Arm architecture has not achieved major success in data centers and cloud, other than in custom chips for hyperscaler use at AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
“It had been rumored that Arm might buy Ampere to promote its server-oriented architecture, and with this acquisition, it essentially has,” said analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates. “SoftBank, as a major shareholder of Arm, hopes that it can now leverage Ampere capability within the emerging AI space to achieve success to both sell Ampere chips as well as gain Arm revenues from the IP licensing. With major projects like Stargate, SoftBank hopes to see big uptake of Ampere-based systems.”
Gold added: “Clearly SoftBank hopes to do with Ampere what it did with Arm, which is to nurture and invest and then open it up for an IPO. But it’s not clear that Ampere has the momentum that Arm has, so it seems like a much riskier move.”
The next two to three years will tell, Gold said.