SoftBank Group said Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a startup that designed an Arm-based server chip, for $6.5 billion.
TakeAway Points:
- SoftBank Group announced on Wednesday that it will pay $6.5 billion to acquire Ampere Computing, a startup that created a server processor based on Arm.
- Oracle and Carlyle Group have both agreed to sell their shares in Ampere, according to SoftBank.
- According to the announcement, Ampere will continue to function as a separate entity and maintain its Santa Clara, California, headquarters.
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has decided not to pursue its appeal in the lawsuit against the payments startup, according to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, which caused XRP to soar.
Chip designer Ampere to be bought in $6.5 billion deal
Ampere Computing, a business that created an Arm-based server semiconductor, will be acquired by SoftBank Group for $6.5 billion, the company announced Wednesday.
The Japanese giant expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025, according to a statement.
Carlyle Group and Oracle both have committed to selling their respective stakes in Ampere, which will operate as an independent subsidiary and will keep its headquarters in Santa Clara, California, according to SoftBank.
“Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision, and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the United States,” SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son was quoted as saying in a separate statement.
The startup has 1,000 semiconductor engineers, SoftBank said.
SoftBank has been broadening its investments in AI infrastructure, including a partnership with OpenAI announced last month to create enterprise level AI and through its involvement in U.S. President Donald Trump’s $500 billion private AI investment project Stargate.
“With a shared vision for advancing AI, we are excited to join SoftBank Group and partner with its portfolio of leading technology companies,” said Renee James, Founder and CEO of Ampere. “This is a fantastic outcome for our team, and we are excited to drive forward our AmpereOne® roadmap for high performance Arm processors and AI.”
Softbank acquired British chip designer Arm in 2016 for $32 billion, with the company launching its initial public offering in 2023.
Chips that use Arm’s instruction set represent an alternative to chips based on the x86 architecture, which Intel and AMD sell. Arm-based chips often consume less energy.
Ampere’s founder and CEO, Renee James, established the startup in 2017 after 28 years at Intel, where she rose to the position of president.
Leading cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services offers a Graviton Arm chip for rent that have become popular among large customers. In October, Microsoft started selling access to its own Cobalt 100 Arm-based cloud computing instances.
Shares of SoftBank were last seen trading down about 2% on Thursday.
XRP surges after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says SEC is dropping its lawsuit against the company
XRP surged after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is no longer pursuing its appeal in the case against the payments company.
The price of XRP was last higher by 10% at $2.49.
“It’s been almost four years and about three months since the SEC originally sued us, certainly a painful journey in lots of ways,” Garlinghouse said at the Digital Assets Summit in New York on Wednesday morning. “I really deeply believed that we were going to be on the right side of the law and on the right side of history.”
“The system just feels broken. That we had to fight this fight for the industry and you had an SEC attacking the industry, particularly the Ripple case,” he continued. “There were no victims, there was no investor loss. They were just not acting in good faith.”
In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple for breaching U.S. securities laws by selling XRP without first registering it with the agency. The company scored a partial victory in 2023 when U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the decision, which was hailed as a landmark win for the crypto industry. Still, while XRP at that point was not considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges, it was considered an unregistered security offering if sold to institutional investors.
The development comes as the SEC moves quickly to reverse much of the damage in the crypto industry left by the previous administration. Last month, the agency ended its enforcement case against Coinbase; closed its investigations into Robinhood’s crypto unit, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys with no enforcement action; scaled back its crypto enforcement unit; and declared meme coins are not securities.
This week, the newly formed SEC crypto task force will kick off a roundtable series focused on defining the security status of digital assets.
XRP was created by the founders of Ripple in 2012. It is the native token of the open source XRP Ledger, which Ripple uses in its cross-border payments business, about 95% of which takes place outside the U.S. Ripple is the largest holder of XRP coins.
The coin was the biggest beneficiary of the postelection Trump trade. It is up more than 385% since then and up 18% this year.
