Arm’s Previously Undisclosed Stake In Ampere Computing

While Amazon has driven most of Arm’s growth in the server CPU market, another company that has been pushing adoption of Arm server chips is a startup called Ampere Computing.

Founded by former Intel executive Renee James, Ampere designs Arm-based server CPUs that have now been adopted in cloud instances by Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and several other cloud service providers across the world. The processors have also been adopted by several server vendors.

In Arm’s IPO filing, the chip designer revealed that it has a 6.8 percent stake in Ampere, which confidentially filed for its own IPO in April of last year. Ampere announced Arm as an investor in 2019 but did not disclose any financial details of the investment.

While it’s now known how much Arm invested in the startup, the chip designer said the carrying value for its investment in the startup was $389.8 million for the fiscal year ended this past March. That is down from the investment’s $416.2 million carrying value in the previous year.

The company added in its IPO filing that it gave a $29 million convertible promissory note to Ampere in December 2021. As of March, the outstanding balance of the note was $30.9 million.

Ampere’s other investors include Oracle and private equity firm The Carlyle Group.