SoftBank Group today said it would acquire Ampere Computing, a developer of Arm-based datacenter CPUs, for $6.5 billion in cash. Ampere will continue operating under its current name as a wholly owned subsidiary with 1,400 employees and will continue to offer its processors. SoftBank, which also controls Arm Holdings, is expected to use Ampere CPUs for its own datacenters, including proposed Stargate datacenters.
Ampere was established in 2018 in Silicon Valley with the backing from Carlyle Group and Oracle with an aim to develop CPUs tailored for the needs of cloud service providers (CSPs), which the company calls 'cloud-native' processors. Since then, the company released two product families — the Ampere Altra with up to 128 cores made on TSMC's N7 node and the AmpereOne with up to 192 cores made on TSMC's N5 manufacturing technology — that gained limited traction in the CSP.
