SoftBank Group confirmed on Wednesday that it has completed its acquisition of Ampere Computing. Through its subsidiary Silver Bands 6 (US) Corp., the group has acquired all shares in the American semiconductor company.
The transaction, valued at $6.5 billion, was announced in March and has now been fully completed. Ampere will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and will continue to operate under its own name.
According to the company, Ampere’s financial results will be included in SoftBank’s consolidated figures from the acquisition date. The company is still investigating the exact impact of the deal on its own financial position. The stock market reacted positively. SoftBank shares rose by up to 8 percent in Tokyo on Wednesday morning after the announcement, suggesting that investors have confidence in the strengthening of the group’s AI strategy.
Ampere was founded by former Intel executive Renee James and focuses on data center processors based on Arm Holdings technology. The company positioned itself as a pioneer in energy-efficient server chips for cloud and AI workloads and built an engineering team of approximately 1,000 technicians. With its focus on scalable, sustainable, and high-performance compute architectures, Ampere has attracted several major customers in the data center market.
SoftBank grows in AI infrastructure
The acquisition fits seamlessly into SoftBank’s broader AI ambitions. The group is already the majority shareholder in Arm, whose technology is increasingly being used in servers and AI infrastructure. It also owns the British company Graphcore, which also develops AI hardware.
By adding Ampere to this portfolio, SoftBank is increasing its grip on the market for energy-efficient data center chips. The company sees Ampere’s technology as an important building block for future cloud and AI systems based on the Arm platform and emphasizes that the combination of these companies should contribute to a stronger, integrated ecosystem for compute infrastructure.