Ampere Computing
More info
- Creator
- Renée James
- Released
- 2017
- Owner
- SoftBank (from 2025)
- Type
- Chip designer
California company building ARM processors with a very large number of cores for cloud servers.
Renée James, formerly president of Intel, founded Ampere in 2017 with private-equity firm Carlyle and Oracle as backers. The starting point was ARM server technology from AppliedMicro. The 2020 Altra had 80 cores based on ARM's Neoverse N1, and its successor AmpereOne uses in-house cores, up to 192 of them.
The bet is that a cloud provider would rather have many predictable cores per watt than a few fast ones, and that each core should be rentable without sharing a thread with a stranger. The chips run in Oracle's OCI and in Azure. SoftBank, which already owns ARM, bought the company in 2025 for $6.5 billion.