SoftBank will pay 6,500 million per ampere. A new war chapter for data centers has just been written

At the beginning of last February the interest of the Japanese Softbank investment group was made public in The acquisition of the chips designer American ampere computing LLC. This last company is specialized in the development of Processors for serverswhich already put at that time on the table SoftBank’s intention to expand your business in large data centers. It made sense in a context in which the rise of the artificial intelligence (AI) is promoting that these facilities multiply at full speed.

Just a month and a half later that strategic movement has established itself. According to your own AmpereSoftBank has just closed your purchase. He will pay 6,500 million dollars for this company and will have one more letter in the presumably prosperous business of the data centers. This investment group is The Arm owner since 2016; At the beginning of last October Invested 500 million dollars in Openai; And, in addition, it is one of the companies that lead The Stargate program with which the US seeks to sustain its dominance of AI.

The war for data centers for AI is already underway

The large technology companies that are involved in the deployment of AI are facing multimillion -dollar investments to develop their data centers infrastructure. Microsoft has confirmed that 80,000 million dollars will be spent during the fiscal year of 2025. and Google, 75,000 million. On the other hand, the Stargate program budget that I have mentioned a few lines above rises to no less than 500,000 million dollars. This is the cake from which SoftBank is being able to seize. At least a good portion.

However, to achieve it the companies that control, or control in the short term, such as ampere, whose processors are implemented on ARM technology, will have to Compete with Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Google or Amazon. In any case, the ampereone chips, which are being manufactured by TSMC in their 3 nm node, will reach 256 cores For 2025 and will presumably have a very competitive energy efficiency. These are his great buzas against the proposals of the competition.

The current situation is triggering something that is worth not overlooking. As Dan O’Brien has observedthe president of the American Futurum consultant, technology companies are forging strategic alliances with the purpose of molding the industry to their measure and maximizing the economic performance of their investments. As we have seen, SoftBank is the owner of ARM. On the other hand, Oracle has a very significant participation in Ampere, which will soon belong to SoftBank, and which is ARM client.

In addition, all the companies in which we have just repaired, SoftBank, ARM, Oracle and OpenAi, participate in the deployment of the infrastructure required by the Stargate program. In any case, This network of dependencies does not end here. As we have seen, SoftBank is an important OpenAI investor, and this last company is Oracle’s partner and is trying to develop His own chips for ia.

Finally, to curl the curl further, rumors that defend that Oracle is interested in buying Tiktok, a company that belongs to the Chinese company bytedance persists. SoftBank also has an important participation in the latter. As O’Brien argues In his tweet “everything is connected (…) It is fascinating to see how the technology titans shape the industry.”

Image | Ampere computing LLC

More information | Ampere computing LLC

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