SoftBank to Acquire U.S. Chip Designer Ampere

Tokyo, March 20 (Jiji Press)--SoftBank Group Corp. said Thursday that it will acquire Ampere Computing Holdings LLC, a U.S. semiconductor design company, for 6.5 billion dollars, as part of its efforts to focus more on artificial intelligence technology.

The Japanese tech conglomerate aims to strengthen its capability to develop AI chips through the combination of the technologies of Ampere, a California startup, and Arm Holdings PLC, SoftBank's own chip design unit in Britain.

Ampere designs high-performance, energy efficient AI chips based on Arm's computing platform.

Arm currently has a stake of about 8 pct in Ampere. SoftBank plans to acquire Ampere shares from U.S. investment fund Carlyle Group, which owns nearly 60 pct of the startup, and others to take full control of it in the second half of this year.

SoftBank has a stake in OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT generative AI tool. They are working together on building AI infrastructure in the United States and offering AI services to corporate customers in Japan.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]