Arm Server Chip Maker Ampere Says It's Readying For An IPO

A public offering will allow Ampere to raise extra investment funding needed to develop its Arm-based server chips and the broader ecosystem surrounding them.

The datacenter market is currently dominated by the X86 chips offered by the likes of Intel and AMD, but recent trends have seen Arm-based systems being adopted by cloud providers, leading researchers at TrendForce to predict that 22 percent of datacenter servers may be Arm-based by 2025.

Ampere was founded in 2017 by CEO Renee James, former president of Intel. Ampere is owned and funded by the Carlyle Group, as well as by SoftBank's Arm subsidiary itself, and Oracle. Oracle's investment in Ampere started out with a sum of $40m in 2019, which then amounted to less than 20 percent of the company’s shares.

However, according to recent reports, Oracle may now own as much as 50 percent of Ampere, based on Oracle's recent Q3 '22 results, where it attributed some of its lower earnings to an operating loss at Ampere.

The road to an Arm-based server ecosystem is littered with companies that have tried and failed to create a viable server platform, including Broadcom, Qualcomm and AMD, but Ampere has had more success than most.

• Microsoft arms Azure VMs with Ampere Altra chips
• TrendForce: AWS to give Arm a leg up to 22% of datacenter servers by 2025
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• SPARCs fly as Oracle recharges Arm server processor designer Ampere with $40m

Microsoft recently added Arm-powered virtual machines to its Azure cloud platform based on Ampere Altra server processors, following Oracle, which has sold Arm-powered instances based on Ampere Altra processors since 2020.

VMware also added support for Ampere's Altra chips to the version of its ESXi hypervisor for the Arm architecture last year, although this is mostly experimental.

Investment needed

Gartner's Priestly added:

"Ampere has [had] design wins at Oracle and a number of T2 CSPs and recently Microsoft announced plans for Azure on Arm using Ampere CPUs. However, while these design wins and AWS use of its Arm-based Graviton are establishing a foothold for Arm in the cloud data centre, the x86 vendors are not standing still and continue to move their ... designs forward – both in terms of performance and functionality.

"Vendors like Ampere need to continue to invest in their designs to compete against x86 – which given the need to leverage leading edge manufacturing nodes is an expensive proposition, also while chip ASPs in the data centre are high the total market is not large, especially when compared to other Arm-base markets such as smartphones – hence the need for successive rounds of VC funding or an IPO.

He concluded: "Ampere is currently the only vendor with a commercial Arm-based CPU for servers so much of the software ecosystem enabling will fall to Ampere if it wants to expand its footprint beyond the cloud – which requires resource investment.</d"

The news of Ampere's potential IPO comes after Arm itself proposed an IPO following the collapse of its sale to Nvidia by current owner SoftBank in February. That IPO is expected to value the chip designer at up to $60b.

Korean chipmaker SK Hynix is reportedly considering forming a consortium to acquire Arm, a consortium that may well include Intel, according to remarks made previously by CEO Pat Gelsinger. ®