There’s a new mega acquisition in artificial intelligence. And SoftBank is behind it.
What’s happening:
- SoftBank has announced they have entered into a new deal to purchase Ampere Computing
By the numbers:
- SoftBank will pay $6.5B USD in cash to acquire Ampere Computing
Why it matters:
- Ampere Computing is one of the most important chip companies to emerge from Silicon Valley, largely due to the fact their hardware is purpose built and designed entirely for artificial intelligence workloads at scale
Going deeper:
- Ampere Computing’s two largest shareholders were Carlyle Group and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) who collectively owned more than 90% of the entire company prior to SoftBank’s acquisition
- SoftBank has been aggressively placing bets on the future of artificial intelligence lately, including being one of the founding partners of the new half a trillion dollar collaboration between OpenAI and Oracle to build out American based data centre infrastructure
