this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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SoftBank to acquire Arm CPUs for datacenter firm Ampere in $6.5 billion cash deal (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

However, as a statement from Ampere reads, the company "is expected to play a key role in future Softbank growth markets, including recently announced AI infrastructure investments like Stargate." SoftBank's AI strategy involves building massive cloud datacenters. Next-generation cloud datacenters for AI are expected to house tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes, which will represent a huge market. If Ampere supplies millions of CPUs to its owner, then its business will expand beyond where it is now. Also, if other Stargate partners — OpenAI and Oracle — adopt Ampere's CPUs as a default choice for their datacenters, this could be a breakthrough for the company. This may never happen, though.

"The future of Artificial Super Intelligence requires breakthrough computing power," said Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp. "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."

Sounds like they don't expect the major cloud providers to be big customers (they design their own ARM systems). Instead this seems to be aimed at the Stargate initiative; Masayoshi Son wants to have his own cloud company powered by Ampere ARM CPUs.

I thought the Stargate initiative was for GPUs (AI processing), but Ampere to my knowledge focuses on CPUs. This is confusing.

It would be funny if Masayoshi Son spends many billions (of other people's money) and then it turns out to be a bust. It's that Masayoshi "WeWork" Son's midas touch.