SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B
89 comments
·March 20, 2025siavosh
jawiggins
SoftBank was founded by Masayoshi Son. It was originally a tech company that resold software (imagine Steam but for desktop apps), but very quickly it morphed into something like a PE firm that would do continual leveraged buyouts of existing firms. They've bought companies that run conferences, tech magazines, one of their more formative M & A deals was to buy the Japanese Vodafone arm. Many of these deals actually went pretty poorly, with Masayoshi overpaying for the firms he bought and then being saddled with very large debts to repay the loans. Masa was wiped out and faced bankruptcy multiple times.
Later on the would move away from leveraged buyouts and start investing in startups more similar to how a VC firm would in the US. He notably invested early in Yahoo and Alibaba.
The company is not a sovereign fund - it's really run at the behest of it's founder. If you want to read more about the story, there was recently a great biography that chronicled the story: Gambling Man (https://www.amazon.com/Gambling-Man-Greatest-Disruptor-Masay...)
alberth
It's just a VC.
But it's so big (maybe biggest in the world), so its reach and influence is immense. And as a result, it has raised money from nations and other enormous entities.
Run by Masa who many consider an oracle because his placed massive bets years before other people and those bets have paid of big.
hn_throwaway_99
> Run by Masa who many consider an oracle because his placed massive bets years before other people and those bets have paid of big.
I'm not sure how many folks these days would consider him an "oracle". He clearly did fabulously well with some early Internet investments, but he also was famous for folly after folly of overpriced investments in the 2010s (the Softbank "Vision Funds").
I'd be curious if there is a simple accounting list of Softbank's major investments ranked from biggest winners to biggest losers. I guess it pretty much highlights the dynamics of the VC business model - you only need a few giant winners to offset the boatload of losers. In Softbank's case, I'm guessing their biggest winners are Yahoo Japan (which was the dominate site in Japan for a long time, and long after the US Yahoo fell into irrelevance) and Alibaba, which saw their early $20 million investment balloon into billions.
But did Softbank have any winners from their 2010s spending spree (along the time where they shoveled good money after bad into WeWork)?
huijzer
VCs are indeed partly about giant winners offsetting the losers. But according to Taleb, the main part is to convince other people to put money in your fund and get rich from the management fees. So from that perspective, VC is mostly about pretending your fund does well and getting people to buy in. That's probably why VCs love to buy companies in overhyped industries.
jonas21
They've made close to $100B on ARM (which they acquired in 2016). This dwarfs the $14B they lost on WeWork. Of course the latter gets far more attention because it's a such an entertaining story.
alberth
He made a big bet on NVIDIA when no one else did.
(Though he sold too soon and missed out)
alephnerd
It's an investment company that primarily specializes in Telecom and telecom adjacent industries (eg. Internet companies, Energy, Space Tech, Hardware).
Most people on HN have only heard of SoftBank's Vision Fund, but that's basically an autonomous organization within SoftBank staffed with Deustche Bank alumni who left in droves in 2017-2020.
> Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?
Yes. Their goal is profit.
> I've become less and less interested in its investments as it seems to simply act like a giant government money channel with questionable investments that don't seem to make sense from a typical VC/PE perspective
This investment is part of their strategy for 6G and IIoT, which is synergistic with their telecom focus.
There has been work over the past 4-5 years to become the leader for creating the standards for 6G, and SoftBank is trying to position themselves to be that player.
re-thc
> Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?
This isn't the vision fund or any of those VC initiatives from SoftBank.
I'd see this as SoftBank who owns ARM is now buying something useful in the same group / segment to consolidate.
Having said that interest in Japan is at record lows (compared to the rest of the world) so financing is a lot easier.
klelatti
So Softbank now competes with Arm's customers and (unless I've missed something on new governance arrangements) also gets access to confidential information on Arm's customers' businesses (plans, volumes etc). Hmmm.
alberth
Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips.
And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop.
So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.
jsheard
They're the only company selling server grade ARM chips but others are rolling their own for internal use, such as Amazons Graviton line. That's Ampere's problem really, their biggest potential customers are so big that they can afford to cut out middlemen like Ampere.
_huayra_
Even if Ampere could afford to undercut the internal development of these hyperscalar ARM chips (which to my knowledge they cannot), there is more value in in-housing ARM chips like Amazon / Microsoft are doing: you can more easily try out wacky ideas in chip / firmware design.
Often times these companies might have an idea for how to save power / tweak cores in a weird way on a CPU, but have a chicken-and-egg problem with not knowing exactly how much it'll reduce COGS. Not knowing that and having to negotiate with a vendor (who will often want to charge more for the feature) means that it's difficult to do unless it's an obvious slam-dunk.
By bringing chip development in-house, adding new features skews more towards a political decision that requires less rigorous financial calculations (e.g. "how much power will this save relative to the vendor_cost++ and our own developer cost?" for 3rd-party chips). It basically allows these cloud providers to ship new features more quickly in their CPUs.
bionade24
Isn't Marvell/Cavium still in the ARM server business, too?
rabunite
Nvidia is making arm server cpus.
whizzter
It kinda makes sense though, ARM has been creeping upwards over the years and yet afaik outside of Ampere no ARM server supplier has become serious (outside of inhouse variants such as Amazon Graviton).
So combining ARM and Ampere operations doesn't hurt any current big customers in the mobile field (apart from perhaps Qualcomm but they're in lawsuit mode there anyhow).
They also make sure to make the ARM alternative available to smaller customers (As an option besides AMD and Intel servers) instead of being gobbled up by f.ex. Oracle (making the big server ARM implementations inhouse to 2 of the big platform operators).
Not to mention the silver lining, combining the ops will give it more credence in the enterprise market that seems to have damn good margins (some have attributed AMD's resurgence and Intel's troubles to Intel slipping in server sales).
klelatti
Largely agree. Arm / Softbank is in a tricky place if there are no credible customers in a given market. Does it just sit on its hands or actually get out there and build some chips! It has helped fund or help some startups that were using Arm designs to get into new markets (eg Annapurna Labs) but sometimes that doesn't work out at all (Nuvia!)
And to be fair I think Rene Haas has been fairly upfront about changing their approach.
SecretDreams
Kind of like Nvidia selling GPUs and also offering cloud GPU services?
klelatti
Somewhat but not competing with its customers has been a central part of Arm's proposition for three decades, for good reason. There are at least a lot of competitors for Nvidia's design. Your options if you want to build a server core are a lot more limited.
re-thc
> Kind of like Nvidia selling GPUs and also offering cloud GPU services?
Different in that ARM only 'designed'. It's more like a framework / library / tool (a very feature complete 1).
The Nvidia case is more similar to having a self-install and then a cloud hosted version of the same software.
HelenGrerne
[dead]
jauntywundrkind
Ampere is still the only people making a decent purchaseable ARM server. Not loving the idea of there being a bunch of new debt hovering over them now.
hereonout2
Got a chance to play about with the Altra Max to do some batch jobs last year.
128 cores going 100% in htop was fun!
jjtheblunt
terinjokes
No BMC, severally limiting remote management, so operations teams responsible for physical servers don't want to touch it.
JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.
robbiet480
Apple has a BMC on the Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro. It's called Lights Out Management (LOM). https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/lights-out-manage...
ahoka
But it comes with a ... checks notes ... magic mouse!
Twirrim
They also won't provide any guarantees about components continuing to work, such as booting over thunderbolt that some clouds rely on. There's an awful lot of financial risk in providing MacOS as a service.
dvdkon
In addition to the problems other people have pointed out, it just doesn't have comparable specs to something like Ampere's Altra or AMD's Epyc.
24 CPU cores and 192 GB of memory might be enough for a small company's single on-site server, but those will likely want lots of storage and not want to deal with an exotic platform. Anyone who's willing to deal with ARM and macOS on a server will likely want a lot more performance per 1U.
Twirrim
Agreed. Rack density is the biggest thing once you get away from "a handful of servers", be it CPU, memory, or storage density.
Side note: I'm curious where this 1:8 ratio of cores:memory came from. Everyone seems to be standardising on it, even at VM levels
pjc50
SEVEN AND A HALF THOUSAND DOLLARS? No wonder we do all our Mac CI work on Mac minis.
Macs remain completely horrendous to remote-administer.
Eikon
That's not a server. It is a rackable desktop.
You won't run general purpose server apps on this.
sitkack
Not with that attitude you won't. Clearly the machine is the wrong color for your workloads.
bayindirh
What is a general purpose server app?
Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?
burnte
Apple products are not server grade equipment.
ciupicri
There's no mention of ECC memory.
ForTheKidz
Bro, come on. Apple hasn't even tried to pretend they're in the server game for at least a decade now. You're paying for dozens of features you'll never use. They don't even have drivers for their own hardware outside of fucking windows, let alone documentation about how their machines are intended to work.
I love my macs but apple will never be a cost or reliability solution to computation unless they do a complete 180. They're a boutique/luxury firm that can choose which markets they want to dominate. If you think there's not a small horde of people at Apple trying to figure out how to pitch bringing the xserve back, I have a bridge to sell you. But unless they can convince CTOs to become sysadmins it'll never be a viable way for a company as large as Apple to drive hardware development.
bayindirh
I use their servers in a couple of cloud environments. That little things are snappy, for what I have given them as tasks. Wish them best of luck to the future.
DeathArrow
And Google just spent five times that to acquire a cyber security startup with 1000 customers.
Is hardware so much less valuable?
pjc50
Yes. Hardware costs money to scale.
sitkack
They are totally separate the Wiz thing is a reverse IDF merger.
The SB purchase is part of Arm completely restructuring their IP philosophy and business model. Ampere was sold for "so little" because Arm could effectively just cut them off as soon as their contract ran out. This was a cleaner transfer.
Arm is bringing everything back in house, ceding the low end to RISC-V and taking the high end back in and producing their own silicon.
alephnerd
> Is hardware so much less valuable?
Margins and TAM.
Those 1000+ customers at Wiz have 7-8 figure TCV deals (I have personally seen a couple of those contracts), and have pipeline in multiple industry verticals - Tech, Telecom, ONG, Healthcare, Finance, Insurance, etc
An embedded and telco oriented firm like Ampere has weaker margins as they have to manufacture hardware, which drastically reduces the amount of money available.
It's also a smaller and more consolidated market with a weaker TAM.
ksynwa
TIL .softbank is a TLD now
npongratz
Indeed, since January 2016: https://icannwiki.org/.softbank
And confirmed by the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160116175915/http://data.iana....
myself248
Opening up TLDs beyond the originals and CCTLDs completely invalidated assumptions about what domains and domain names should mean. A massive disservice to everyone whose intuition was helping them avoid scams and squatting, but hey, at least a lot of money changed hands.
alephnerd
A lot of people are ignoring the fact that SoftBank Group is also one of the largest players in the telco market globally (that's how they started) [0] and that played a role in their Arm strategy and Eutelsat OneWeb strategy.
It's useful to look at the Ampere acquisition from the same lens, as Ampere is heavily used for telco usecases [1]
SoftBank Group has heavily invested in O-RAN to act as the base technology for what will become 6G, and they have been making a number of partnerships, investments, and acquisitions specifically around this [2][3].
SoftBank has been working on a 6G/Beyond 5G strategy for several years now [4] - primarily targeting embedded usecases such as autonomous vehicles [5][6]
[0] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/
[1] - https://amperecomputing.com/press/ampere-accelerates-expansi...
[2] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/press/sbkk/2024/2024022...
[3] - https://www.o-ran.org/membership
[4] - https://www.suasnews.com/2021/08/softbank-corp-unveils-6g-co...
[5] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/051...
[6] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/069...
downrightmike
Is anyone happy with telco price gouging? In spite of whatever else they are doing, they always price gouge and allow spam/ransom calls.
null
pjmlp
Well, I guess it was either them or Oracle, given previous acquisition rumours.
bayindirh
Given Oracle's tendency to use pillows on processor architectures and bury them at night, Softbank is possibly the better of two evils?
Jokes aside, I don't believe Oracle would evolve the A1s beyond what they need, and stagnate them for years instead.
whizzter
I think SB might've upped the bid a bit extra with Oracle as the other suitor. With Graviton and Ampere processors owned by hyperscalers it would've been a very unfortunate time for the ARM server market to become stagnant.
Right now ARM is in a golden position to take server market pieces, higher compute densities with simpler i-set and good software support thanks to years of mobile and now Apple support (most language implementators wants things to run on Mac's so bugs and perf have been getting fixed)
If Oracle would've bought them, third parties (in this case including both Microsoft with Azure and Google) would probably have held back on ARM investments (not to mention smaller operators), Qualcomm being in lawsuit mode would also had sown doubt, maybe some other manufacturer would introduce chips in the meanwhile but they would be small and given time Risc-V might even pop up on the horizon as an alternative hurting ARM on server chances even more.
Now they're "independant", with better software support than ever, guaranteeing availability to smaller parties (at a time when many of those are outside the US and wanting alternatives) and a chance to benefit from vertical integration.
pjmlp
Might be, but that is the thing, while it is tradition to complain about Oracle, in many cases their are the only ones that show up at the door with the suitcase full of money.
So where are the others that supposedly are better than them?
In this case, Softbank will be having ARM and Ampere.
bayindirh
This depends on definition of "better". Maybe your question is better suited as "So, where are the others that supposedly are richer than them?"
In that case, we have the CPU manufacturers, which already do this as the business, Google, which is not that interested, or already make their own chips, Apple, which has an in-house CPU/GPU company, and probably IBM, which also designs and builds their own processors.
So, the only interested shopper in the vicinity is Oracle, and they happen to have the money. The others have the money, but not the interest.
twoodfin
I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after the Sun acquisition.
They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent in-house evolution of SPARC almost 8 years after the acquisition, a veritable eternity in tech time.
Eventually the market just said, no, we want x64 and a path to Cloud.
One wonders if they’d kept at it for a few more years whether they’d have needed to bid for Altera at all, given the gaps opened up by Intel’s struggles.
pjmlp
Which is a pity, given that Solaris SPARC has been doing hardware memory tagging in production for a decade now.
lvl155
Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?
MangoCoffee
>with coming decline in x86
What indication is there that x86 is on the decline? Intel might be on the decline, but AMD seems to be doing fine, and Windows on ARM looks to go nowhere, even with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon
trynumber9
What ARM core is available for AMD to use that is better than what AMD has been shipping in Turin?
Adapting Zen to a simpler-to-decode architecture would cost more than licensing a core from ARM. The Zen 5 front-end is adapted for working around deficiencies of x86 with dual-decode SMT craziness.
FuriouslyAdrift
AMD has an entire line of ARM chips and there's an ARM in every x86 CPU they make. They've been making ARM chips for a long long time.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
rnrn
I assume the question is why AMD is not making EPYC or Ryzen processors with Arm cores for the application processors.
AMD continuing to have the Xilinx line of FPGAs with some Cortex cores and having Arm management cores that run firmware doesn’t really address this.
rnrn
I don’t think x86 as an ISA is necessarily declining much and AMD has products with zen4c / zen5c compact cores intended to compete with Arm server products. AMD doesn’t have to pay licensing / royalties for x86 AFAIK and probably would prefer to keep x86 and not start paying arm and creating any adoption barrier form a change of ISA (however small) if they can make competitive x86 cores.
everfrustrated
Because people are (mass generalisation) mostly only buying Arm to save money over x86. For AMD to get into Arm would be to kill their profit margins. Same curse that Intel had.
zoobab
Softbank is BigOil money.
alephnerd
Wrong. It's telco money - SoftBank Group is primarily a telco vendor and provider, and works closely with NEC, DoCoMo, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Airtel.
SoftBank Vision Fund is a separate subgroup of SoftBank targeted at VC, and was largely operated and managed by ex-Deustche Bank alumni due to Rajeev Misra and Colin Fan poaching their colleagues like Ziyad Al-Ashaikh (the guy who helped land the Saudi PIF deal), Akshay Naheta, Munich Verma, Saleh Romeih, etc
Havoc
The fund LPs are definitely oil heavy so wouldn’t say he’s wrong
alephnerd
In Vision Fund yes, but Vision Fund is just a part of the larger SoftBank Group, and did NOT partake in this transaction. This was a transaction done by SoftBank Group directly.
And much of Vision Fund's MENA LPs would leave if a couple key Vision Fund partners were to leave - they did the same with Desutche Bank.
yapyap
Softbank is such an odd company.
brcmthrowaway
Did anyone get a haircut?
Can someone knowledgeable explain SoftBank? Is it partly a Japanese sovereign fund...I've become less and less interested in its investments as it seems to simply act like a giant government money channel with questionable investments that don't seem to make sense from a typical VC/PE perspective. Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?