As an investor, Softbank He is known for his great.
This mentality appeared clearly on Wednesday evening, when technology trading announced Acquires a design company Chip Ampere computingin a money transaction price $ 6.2 billion. According to the agreement, AMPER will act as a subsidiary entirely at the SoftBank Group.
Established in 2017, Ampere with Silicon Valley designs high -performance AI systems based on the ARM computing platform. The company had previously raised $ 814 million of well -known funding, z Oracle and private equity company Carlyle As the predominant supporters.
Of course, Softbank knows a lot about the arm ecosystem, after purchasing the British producer of Chips Armament in 2016 for $ 32 billion. It was a famous successful investment, and ARM is public in 2023, and currently it had a market capitalization of around $ 124 billion.
AI growing portfolio
In the case of SoftBank, the AMPER contract matches a broader investment strategy around AI infrastructure. In the contract announcement, he quoted other recent investments on this subject, including cooperation With Openai To develop advanced AI Enterprise.
The most visible, Softbank is the predominant partner and supporting Stargate projectMulticompany Initiative, which wants to spend $ 500 billion in the next 4 years on the construction of AI data centers and infrastructure. Softbank boss Son of Masayoshi He will act as chairman of the project.
Softbank also accelerates activity Vision Fund. The fund recurrently occupied the most energetic and best -held supporters of startups a few years ago, around the market summit. However, it decreased rapidly in later quarters, because many of the largest unicorn plants didn’t cope poorly.
Now Vision Fund has returned to the game. So far this year he has participated in eight well -known funds of financing, on Crunchbase data. Over the past two weeks, the company has conducted two large investments: $ 130 million C series for solar technologies startup Nagase energy and $ 120 million in late -stage financing for a cyber security supplier Cyberason.
In other large contracts in recent quarters, the fund took part in the New York clinical stage of Biofarmaceutical Startup CitiesSeries B 215 million dollars Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners AND Wellington Managementand also in India Successful executive educationSeries $ 150 million F.
The fund also made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in the cloud safety startup Wizard in November. Will Google contact the planned purchase of a company in the amount of $ 32 billion, which should turn into a very profitable plant.