Oracle already owns 29 percent of U.S. Arm chipmaker Ampere. While founder Renée James is set to retire from the board at Oracle, the tech giant has the option to take over its company starting in 2027.
That’s according to an SEC filing which appeared a few days ago. The total value of Oracle investments in Ampere since 2017 is $1.5 billion, the document shows. As of January 2027, it is in a position to take control of Ampere.
Arm-struggle
For a while, Ampere was considered the leading provider of data center chips based on the Arm architecture. However, that landscape has since diversified. Both Google and AWS now have their own variants based on Arm designs in the form of the recently announced Axion and the now years-old Graviton series, respectively. Several media outlets have also reported that Apple is working on its own AI processors to run in data centers. In short: Ampere’s added value is a lot less clear in 2024 than it used to be.
Meanwhile, Oracle’s own cloud infrastructure (OCI) also runs largely on hardware different from Ampere’s. GPUs from Nvidia and AMD collectively form giant clusters. A recent example of such an OCI Supercluster contains 131,072 Blackwell chips from Nvidia. The emphasis on GPUs pushes Ampere’s CPUs into a corner where it already has hefty competition. Intel and AMD also have huge core numbers with their data center processors these days, following Ampere’s lead. Although the AmpereOne processor is going to offer up to 512 cores, the 128 cores in the Intel Xeon 6P are a lot faster and, thanks to x86, come with legacy support for workloads.
With Intel’s Xeon 6 E-core line and AMD’s Epyc 5 chips based on economical Zen 5c cores, the age-old CPU giants are battling the notion that x86 would be less efficient than Arm. According to Ampere founder Renée James, that perceived higher efficiency was the main reason Ampere (and Arm) would eventually win the battle with x86.
Ampere sales
Just a week ago, it was revealed that Ampere was looking for a new owner. With a value estimated at $8 billion two years ago, it is seeking advice on possible options, Bloomberg wrote. Originally, the plan was for an IPO, an effort that had even led to a secret IPO filing in 2022. Now there is a real chance that that will not come to pass at all, but Ampere will instead merge into Oracle.
Also read: Oracle and AWS bury the hatchet: Oracle Database@AWS is coming