SoftBank to acquire chip designer Ampere in $6.5 billion deal

SoftBank Group said Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a startup that designed an Arm-based server chip, for $6.5 billion. The company expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025, according to a statement.

Carlyle Group and Oracle both have committed to selling their stakes in Ampere, SoftBank said.

Ampere will operate as an independent subsidiary and will keep its headquarters in Santa Clara, California, the statement said.

“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,” SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son was quoted as saying in the statement.

The startup has 1,000 semiconductor engineers, SoftBank said in a separate statement.

Chips that use Arm’s instruction set represent an alternative to chips based on the x86 architecture, which Intel and AMD sell. Arm-based chips often consume less energy. Ampere’s founder and CEO, Renee James, established the startup in 2017 after 28 years at Intel, where she rose to the position of president.

Leading cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services offers Graviton Arm chip for rent that have become popular among large customers. In October, Microsoft started selling access to its own Cobalt 100 Arm-based cloud computing instances.

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