SoftBank Group Corp. late today confirmed that it will buy the chipmaker Ampere Computing LLC in a deal that’s valued at $6.5 billion.

It said it expects the acquisition to close during the second half of the year, according to a statement. Oracle Corp. and Carlyle Group, two of the main stakeholders in Ampere, have both agreed to sell their stakes in the company.

Ampere will operate as an independent subsidiary of SoftBank. It will continue to be based at its headquarters in Santa Clara, California.

Founded in 2017 by former Intel President Renee James, the chipmaker specializes in Arm-based central processing units for data center servers. Its most powerful chip is the new AmpereOne M, which only started shipping in December. The processor features up to 192 cores and higher memory bandwidth than its predecessors, enabling applications to move data to and from the random-access memory much faster.

The company is also working on the development of an even more powerful chipset called Aurora that will feature up to 512 cores, twice as many as the AmpereOne M. It will also have a dedicated module for artificial intelligence, and ship with high-bandwidth memory or HBM, which is a new kind of high-speed RAM that’s widely used in AI accelerators.

Ampere’s products are an alternative to the x86-based server chips sold by Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The Arm-based architecture means they generally consume much less energy.

SoftBank Chairman and Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said in a statement he’s buying Ampere, which employs about 1,000 semiconductor engineers, because the future of “artificial super intelligence” requires breakthrough computing power.

“Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision, and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the United States,” he added.

Reports that Ampere was exploring a sale first emerged in September. Back then, Bloomberg reported the company had hired a financial adviser to help it weigh up its options. SoftBank emerged as a potential suitor in January, and last month it was reported that talks over a deal were progressing well.

SoftBank is already a major player in the chip market thanks to its stake in Arm Holdings Plc, which it acquired for $32 billion back in 2016. Arm went public via an initial public offering in 2023, but SoftBank still holds a majority stake in the company.

Last July, SoftBank inked a deal to acquire another chipmaker called Graphcore Ltd., which, like Arm, is based in the U.K. Graphcore has built a specialized AI processor known as the Bow IP that’s based on wafer-on-wafer technology. It comprises two vertically stacked layers, with one containing the logic circuits and a second that holds the capacitors, which are components that can hold an electric charge. The capacitors deliver this electricity to the logic circuits more efficiently, boosting their performance.

It has been said that SoftBank may encourage Ampere to partner with Graphcore and build AI servers that include not only those accelerators, but also Arm-based CPUs that can help to coordinate AI workloads.

Image: Ampere