Softbank to Acquire Ampere for $6.5 Billion in Cash

This is a big one. Today, Softbank announced the planned acquisition of Ampere Computing. There has been a lot of speculation in the market about Ampere’s future, and now it appears as though there is a direction.

Softbank to Acquire Ampere for $6.5 Billion in Cash

Under the transaction details for the deal, Ampere Computing will retain its name, so the chips should still be AmpereOne, Ampere Altra, and so forth. Major investors such as Oracle (a big Ampere chip customer) and the Carlyle Group will sell their stakes as part of the $6.5B cash acquisition that is expected to close in the second half of 2025.

This comes at a time after Qualcomm Wons Big Versus Arm. It is quite interesting since Softbank also bought ARM Holdings and Graphcore.

The big question is what is next for Softbank and Ampere. We know that Project Stargate is a big investment area, but the cost driver will likely be the AI accelerators and networking, then perhaps the CPUs. In 2022, we highlighted how The Most Important Server of 2022, was the Gigabyte Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA A100 system since NVIDIA was heading down the path of Arm-based CPUs with AI accelerators. At GTC 2025, NVIDIA certainly leaned into that.

Our sense is that this was not an acquisition because Softbank wants to take Intel Xeon market share. Instead, this gets a lot more interesting if you think of it in the context of investing in a massive AI infrastructure. Much the same way as Amazon bought Annapurna Labs which has paved the way for a massive silicon effort at AWS this seems like a direction for Softbank. In the era of AI, having a CPU and a team that can create custom silicon for hyper-scale style deployments is important for those building out the next-generation of massive infrastructure.

Final Words

I know we have quite a few folks who work at Ampere that read STH, so I just wanted to say congratulations. Hopefully we see an exciting set of developments in the AmpereOne and future roadmaps from the company.