SoftBank could soon buy Renee James’ Ampere chip company for about $6.5B

Ampere, the semiconductor business founded by former Intel exec Renee James, is reportedly on the cusp of selling itself to SoftBank — the latest in an ongoing saga over the company’s future ownership.

The deal could value Ampere at about $6.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. That’s a price cut from the $8 billion valuation in 2021, when SoftBank was in talks to buy a minority stake.

Ampere designs ARM chips for the data center, a good fit for SoftBank, which is the majority owner of chip designer ARM Holdings. Ampere declined to comment.

Ampere was created in 2017 by James after she left a 28-year career at Intel when she was passed over for the CEO role. She had been working as a dealmaker at private equity company Carlyle and was on the board of Oracle at the time.

James discovered that chipmaker Macom wanted to sell a piece of its chip business, and she pitched Carlyle and Oracle with an idea to buy it. Both agreed to help her fund the acquisition.

When she founded Ampere, she became one of two women leading a semiconductor company. The other is AMD CEO Lisa Su.

James’ idea was to make data center chips from low-energy ARM designs, a novel concept for its day. Oracle became a large customer, as did other big cloud providers, including Microsoft.

In October, however, Oracle disclosed in its annual report that it not only owned 29% of Ampere, but it also held options and convertible notes that would allow it to commandeer a controlling stake of the company.

These agreements were made directly with Ampere and with other unnamed Ampere investors.

“If either of such options is exercised by us or our co-investors, we would obtain control of Ampere and consolidate its results with our results of operation,” Oracle wrote.

In that same filing, Oracle said that James would be leaving the board at the end of her term in mid-November. James had been an Oracle board member since 2015.

Because Ampere is a private company, we don’t know how much of it James still owns, where she’s been CEO since she founded it.

However, the company has been rumored to be on the market for a buyer since September and the deal with SoftBank is not final. Sources told Bloomberg that the terms could change or the deal might not happen at all.