With $6.2B Purchase Of Chip Designer Ampere, SoftBank Is Going Big This Year

As an investor, SoftBank is known for going big.

That mentality came across clearly Wednesday evening, when the storied tech dealmaker announced it will acquire chip design company Ampere Computing, in a $6.2 billion cash transaction. Under terms of the deal, Ampere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Group.

Founded in 2017 by former Intel President Renee James, Silicon Valley-based Ampere designs high-performance AI chips based on the Arm compute platform. The company previously raised $814 million in known funding, with Oracle and private equity firm Carlyle as its lead backers.

Of course, SoftBank knows quite a bit about the Arm ecosystem, having acquired British chipmaker Arm Holdings in 2016 for $32 billion. It was a famously successful investment, with Arm going public in 2023 and currently sporting a market cap around $124 billion.

Growing AI portfolio

For SoftBank, the Ampere deal fits into a broader investment strategy around AI infrastructure. In the deal announcement, it cited other recent investments around this theme, including a partnership with OpenAI to develop advanced enterprise AI.

Most prominently, SoftBank is a lead partner and backer for The Stargate Project, a multicompany initiative which is looking to spend $500 billion over the next four years to build out AI datacenters and infrastructure. SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son will serve as chairman of the project.

SoftBank has also been stepping up activity for its Vision Fund. The fund regularly ranked among the most-active and highest-spending startup backers a few years ago, around the market peak. However, it scaled back sharply in later quarters, as many of its largest unicorn bets fared poorly.

Now Vision Fund is back in the game. So far this year, it’s participated in eight known funding rounds, per Crunchbase data. In the past two weeks, the firm led two large investments: a $130 million Series C for solar technology startup Terabase Energy and a $120 million late-stage financing for cybersecurity provider Cybereason.

In other big deals in recent quarters, the fund took part in New York-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical startup Metsera’s $215 million Series B led by Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners and Wellington Management, as well as India-based Eruditus Executive Education’s $150 million Series F.

The fund also made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in cloud security startup Wiz in November. Should Google consummate its planned $32 billion purchase of the company, that ought to turn into a very profitable wager.