- SoftBank buying Ampere may signal shift from licensing to manufacturing
- Stargate project could benefit from Ampere’s experienced chip designers
- OpenAI lacks internal chip development team so that makes sense
Arm’s Japanese owner, SoftBank, is set to acquire Ampere – Arm’s only independent server chip vendor – for $6.5 billion (approximately ¥973.0 billion).
It’s 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 Arm’s 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 aren’t 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 Ampere’s 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 he’s 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.