SoftBank Group just announced they will be acquiring Ampere Computing, the leader in ARM64 server processors that has come under increasing pressure with more of the public cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon/AWS turning to their own in-house ARM64 server processor designs.
SoftBank will be acquiring Ampere Computing in an all-cash transaction as $6.5 billion USD. Oracle and Carlyle are among those selling their stakes in Ampere.
They anticipate this deal will close in the second half of 2025.
The press release announcing the transaction can be found on AmpereComputing.com.
The announcement isn’t too surprising given SoftBank’s involvement in Arm and expecting Ampere Computing to be acquired… Though many had speculated it would ultimately have been acquired by Oracle given their existing relationship. Ampere Computing makes the leading ARM64 server processors that are readily available though they have struggled in recent times to ship AmpereOne at scale after being well behind schedule and now competing with the latest AMD EPYC Turin and Intel Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors. Most of the current excitement around Ampere Computing hardware continues to be with the years old Ampere Altra designs. Hopefully SoftBank’s acquisition will help Ampere in a more aggressive road-map moving forward.
