SoftBank Group Corp., a Japanese high-tech investment company, has entered into an agreement to acquire the American startup Ampere Computing LLC. This is reported in a press release from SoftBank.
The value of the transaction is $6.5 billion. The financing involves attracting loans from Mizuho Bank and other financial companies.
Oracle Corp. and the Carlyle Group, which own 32.3% and 59.7% of Ampere shares, respectively, intend to sell their shares in the startup. Arm Technology Investment owns 8.1% of Ampere.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2025. After the deal closes, Ampere will retain the status of an independent division with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, and will continue to develop energy-efficient Arm-based processors for data centers.
The Raine Group and Morrison&Foerster are acting as advisors to the deal.
From the point of view of SoftBank's management, the acquisition of the startup is in line with the company's strategy aimed at investing in AI infrastructure, including partnering with OpenAI and participating in the $500 billion Stargate private investment AI project to create an artificial intelligence system infrastructure in the United States.
Negotiations on the sale of Ampere began in September 2024, and in January 2025, SoftBank became the main bidder to acquire Ampere shares as part of the second major investment in the sector. In July 2024, SoftBank bought out Graphcore, a British startup developing Bow IP AI processors based on wafer-on-wafer technology.
Ampere's integration with Graphcore and Arm will enable the creation of comprehensive AI infrastructure solutions combining energy-efficient CPUs and specialized accelerators.
SoftBank is a Japanese high—tech investment holding company. The company's net profit is 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion). The headquarters is located in Tokyo (Japan).
Ampere Computing LLC is an American startup manufacturing processors for data centers based on Arm technologies. The flagship AmpereOne M chip, released in December 2024, has improved memory bandwidth. In addition, Ampere is developing an Aurora processor with a module for solving AI tasks and with support for high-speed HBM memory with reduced power consumption. The headquarters is located in Santa Clara, California.
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