SoftBank agrees to acquire Ampere Computing for $6.5bn

SoftBank Group agreed to acquire Ampere Computing, a Santa Clara-based designer of Arm-architecture server processors, for $6.5 billion in cash. Ampere was to become a wholly owned SoftBank subsidiary while keeping its name and headquarters; existing investors Carlyle and Oracle sold their stakes as part of the deal, which SoftBank said was expected to close in the second half of 2025.

Founded in 2018, Ampere had built a business supplying energy-efficient, Arm-based CPUs aimed at cloud and edge data centres — an alternative to the x86 chips from Intel and AMD that still dominate server racks. SoftBank chairman and chief executive Masayoshi Son framed the purchase as part of a broader AI-infrastructure strategy, saying Ampere’s “expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision” and calling it a deepening of SoftBank’s commitment to AI investment in the United States.

The acquisition extended a chip portfolio that already included SoftBank’s majority stake in Arm Holdings and its earlier purchase of Graphcore, positioning the conglomerate as an investor across multiple layers of AI compute — CPU architecture licensing, server-chip design and AI accelerators — rather than betting on any single vendor. It also came amid SoftBank’s much larger financial commitments to AI that year, including its leading role in OpenAI’s funding round and the Stargate data-centre venture, underscoring how aggressively the company was positioning itself in AI infrastructure ahead of its returns being proven out.