SoftBank Group Corp. announced it has planned a $6.5 billion acquisition of chip designer Ampere Computing. The acquisition will significantly expand the Japanese investment firm’s thrust into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, the latest ripple in a wave of moves by tech companies to capitalize on AI spending boom.
The all-cash offer, part of a series of AI-related investments by SoftBank, gives it access to Ampere’s energy-efficient processors for cloud and AI computing. The Silicon Valley startup’s expertise in chip development through 1,000 engineers complements the design strengths of SoftBank unit Arm Holdings, according to SoftBank.
“The future of artificial super intelligence requires breakthrough computing power,” SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said in a statement announcing the deal. “Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision, and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the U.S.”
The deal, expected to close in the second half of this year, comes nearly two months after SoftBank was named as a founding member of Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to build data centers in the U.S. over the next few years, along with Oracle Corp., OpenAI, and MGX. Under SoftBank’s acquisition, Ampere’s lead investors, Oracle and Carlyle Group, will sell their stakes in Ampere.
“We are excited to join SoftBank Group and partner with its portfolio of leading technology companies,” Ampere CEO Renée James said in a statement. “This is a fantastic outcome for our team, and we are excited to drive forward our AmpereOne road map for high-performance Arm processors and AI.”
As demand for advanced chips skyrockets amid mega-expenditures on AI infrastructure that conservatively runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, Ampere may provide SoftBank with a compelling vehicle to increase its ability to capture some of that spending, according to industry experts. Ampere executives have presented their chips as energy efficient when the cost and resource demands of large data centers make them increasingly difficult to build and run.
There is no shortage of massive data center projects in the pipeline domestically. In recent months, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Intel Corp., and others have touted multibillion-dollar projects in the U.S. On Wednesday, NVIDIA Corp. and Elon Musk’s xAI said they had joined a $30 billion consortium backed by Microsoft Corp., BlackRock, and investment firms Global Infrastructure Partners and MGX, to expand AI infrastructure in the U.S.
