Analyst claims Softbank bought Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion to help OpenAI's chip ambitions

Date:
Sat, 29 Mar 2025 16:27:00 +0000

Description:
Did SoftBank spend $6.5 billion on Ampere to power OpenAIs massive Stargate project?

FULL STORY ======================================================================SoftBank
buying Ampere may signal shift from licensing to manufacturing Stargate project could benefit from Amperes experienced chip designers OpenAI lacks internal chip development team so that makes sense

Arms Japanese owner, SoftBank, is set to acquire Ampere - Arm's only independent server chip vendor - for $6.5 billion (approximately 973.0 billion).

Its a big move, and one that could see Arm shift from simply licensing chip designs to manufacturing its own silicon. The move would put it in direct competition with its existing customers but also expand Arms footprint in the growing and highly lucrative data center space.

The deal is set to conclude in the latter half of 2025, subject to the usual regulatory approvals, including U.S. antitrust clearance. The Santa Clara, California-based Ampere will continue operating under its current structure until then. The exact reasons for the acquisition arent known outside of Ampere and SoftBank, but there are plenty of theories flying around. It makes a lot of sense

The Next Platform thinks it may have something to do with the Stargate project, which President Trump announced at the start of 2025 and which will see OpenAI working with SoftBank and Oracle (which, incidentally, is a major investor in Ampere) to secure American leadership in AI and boost the US tech sector.

How would Amperes acquisition fit into Stargate? The Next Platform notes, probably somewhere around 1,500 of the nearly 2,000 people at Ampere
Computing are chip designers and these people, plus those working at Graphcore, could be tapped by OpenAI to help design custom CPUs and GPUs for the Stargate effort.

While hes not claiming any insider knowledge, TNP s Timothy Prickett Morgan said, Why else would SoftBank pay $6.5 billion for a company that is hoping
to be a second-source processor for the hyperscalers and cloud builders who are all making their own Arm server CPUs and who also buy scads of x86 server processors from Intel and AMD?

It's a good question. As far as we know, Sam Altman & Co. has not put
together a chip development team of any appreciable size, and even if it had, OpenAI has not created a compute engine and shepherded it through
development, Prickett Morgan concludes. You might also like Softbank buys Ampere for $6.5 billion, could integrate it with Arm and Graphcore How Ampere Computing plans to ride the AI wave Arm may be planning to hike prices, has considered developing its own chips



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/analyst-claims-that-softbank-bought-ampere-compu ting-for-usd6-5-billion-to-help-openais-chip-ambitions


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