By Stephen Nellis and Anton Bridge
SANTA CLARA, California/TOKYO (Reuters) -Japanese technology investor SoftBank Group is accelerating its move into chip technology corporations with the $6.5 billion purchase of Ampere Computing, a U.S. chip startup founded by the previous president of Intel.
The all-cash deal announced on Wednesday comes as SoftBank steps up its investment within the infrastructure needed to power artificial intelligence, which founder Masayoshi Son has latched on to as his latest grand bet on a transformative technology.
It follows a series of multi-billion dollar investments announced in recent months, including in ChatGPT operator OpenAI, the Stargate project to construct AI data center infrastructure within the U.S. and Cristal, a three way partnership with OpenAI to develop AI services in Japan for corporate customers.
Ampere makes data center central processing unit (CPU) chips based on a computing architecture from SoftBank’s majority-owned Arm Holdings which are utilized by firms akin to Oracle of their cloud computing infrastructure.
As a part of the deal, Ampere’s biggest investors, Oracle and Carlyle Group, will sell their respective positions in the corporate, SoftBank said.
Son said in a press release that the longer term of “artificial super intelligence” would require breakthrough computing power.
“Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help speed up this vision, and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the US,” he said.
Founded in 2018 by Intel veteran Renee James, Ampere built CPUs with its own custom computing core technology, a step normally only taken by much larger firms like Apple or Qualcomm.
Arm ultimately became a competitor because it sought to work directly with customers akin to Microsoft and Google to assist them construct their very own custom Arm-based CPUs.
Google had adopted Ampere’s chips, but a 12 months later after Google worked with Arm to develop its own “Axon” CPU, a Google executive told Reuters it might not be deploying more Ampere chips.
Under SoftBank’s ownership, Ampere can be a stable mate of Arm within the Japanese conglomerate’s growing collection of chip technology corporations which are boosting their deal with AI.
SoftBank’s Son made his name and fortune on high conviction bets on latest technologies, akin to e-commerce and mobile web, but his foray into AI has come at a time of sky-high valuations and his investment record is patchy.
Shared office provider WeWork went into administration after SoftBank poured billions of dollars into it, while the portfolio of technology startups held by the Japanese company’s Vision Fund investment vehicles has plummeted in value since 2022.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Santa Clara, California, Anton Bridge in Tokyo and Harshita Meenaktshi in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona and Jamie Freed)