- SoftBank’s purchase amperium can indicate the change from licenses to manufacturing
- The Stargate project could benefit from experienced ampere chips designers
- Operai lacks an internal chip development team, so it makes sense
The Japanese owner of ARM, SoftBank, is ready to acquire ampere, the only ARM independent server chips supplier, for $ 6.5 billion (approximately ¥ 973.0 billion).
It is a great movement, and one that could see the change of the arm of simply license chips designs to manufacture its own silicon. The movement would put it in direct competition with its existing clients, but it would also expand the Footprint of ARM in the growing and highly lucrative space of the data center.
The agreement will conclude in the second half of 2025, subject to the usual regulatory approvals, including the antimonopoly authorization of the United States. The amperium based in Santa Clara, California, will continue to operate under its current structure until then. The exact reasons for the acquisition are not known outside ampere and softbank, but there are many theories flying.
It makes a lot of sense
The next platform He believes that he can have something to do with the Stargate project, which President Trump announced in early 2025 and that he will make Openai work with SoftBank and Oracle (which, by the way, is a great investor in amps) to ensure US leadership in AI and increase the US technological sector.
How would Ampere acquisition in Stargate fit? The next platform The notes: “Probably somewhere around 1,500 of the almost 2,000 people in Ampere Computing are chip designers and these people, in addition to those who work in Graphcore, could be used by OpenAi to help design CPU and Custom GPU for Stargate effort.”
As long as it does not claim any internal knowledge, TNPTimothy Prickett Morgan said: “Why would Softbank pay for $ 6.5 billion for a company that hopes to be a second -source processor for hyperscalers and cloud builders who are making their own CPU of the ARM server and also buy Scads of Intel and AMD X8 server processors?”
It is a good question. “As far as we know, Sam Altman & Co. has not brought together a chip development team of any appreciable size, and even if it had done so, Operai has not created a computing engine and has grazed it through development,” concludes Prickett Morgan.
