SoftBank’s $6.5b deal for US chip firm Ampere gets FTC nod

The US Federal Trade Commission has ended its review of SoftBank Group Corp.’s US$6.5 billion acquisition of Ampere Computing LLC, clearing a key regulatory hurdle for the deal.

SoftBank, based in Japan, announced the all-cash purchase of Ampere, a US company that designs server processors used in data centers, in March.

A notice posted on the FTC’s website confirmed the early termination of the review as of November 12.

According to Bloomberg, the FTC had previously opened an in-depth investigation of the transaction.

SoftBank is also the majority owner of Arm Holdings, whose chip technology is widely used in the electronics industry, and Ampere is among Arm’s licensees.

Representatives for both companies did not comment on the FTC’s decision.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

FTC clearance is one step; CFIUS review remains the open question

FTC early termination only wraps Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) antitrust review. The deal still needs Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approval, the interagency panel that vets deals on U.S. national security grounds 1.
Reviews can drag. SoftBank dropped its $40 billion Arm sale to Nvidia after in-depth antitrust probes 2.
Closing was targeted for the second half of 2025 3. Extended FTC reviews have often lasted over a year, and CFIUS clearance is still pending 2 1.
Ampere has about 1,000 semiconductor engineers 1, and is one of the few independent teams designing high-performance data center chips 4. That could prompt closer review of foreign control over processors that power large-scale AI and cloud services.

Cloud providers and enterprise software vendors can prepare for an Ampere expansion

If the deal closes, SoftBank backing could expand Ampere’s reach. Today it powers Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) instances that include bare metal (dedicated physical servers without a hypervisor) with 160 cores and flexible Virtual Machine (VM) shapes (predefined instance sizes) 5.
Independent software vendors (ISVs) and infrastructure firms should prioritize Arm-optimized releases. Enterprises that move to Arm-based clouds have seen up to 65% better price-performance and 60% better energy efficiency 6.
IT consulting shops and migration specialists can use the Arm Cloud Migration Program to move workloads to Arm-based instances 6. Supported targets include Amazon Web Services (AWS) Graviton (AWS’s Arm-based chips); Google Axion (Google’s in-house Arm-based server CPU); Microsoft Azure Cobalt (Microsoft’s Arm-based chip); and OCI Ampere 6.
Vendors that time optimization work for a second half of 2025 close 3 can meet early waves of enterprise migration.