Oracle Invested $40 Million in Arm Server Chipmaker Ampere

In a SEC filing on Friday, Oracle disclosed that it has invested $40 million in Ampere Computing, a server chipmaker start-up that is led by former Intel president Renée James. The investment is notable because AMD’s return to the data center space already brought competition back.

The filing concerns Oracle’s announcement of its 2019 stakeholder meeting. The investment was disclosed in a list of transactions with related persons, as Ampere founder and CEO Renée James has been a board member since 2015. She left Intel in 2015 as Intel’s president under former CEO Brian Krzanich. 

Oracle discloses that it invested $40 million in the company in April 2019 and has also appointed one director to Ampere’s board. The company also says that it holds less than 20% of the company, which indicates that Ampere is valued at least at $200 million. Oracle also disclosed that it paid $419,000 to Ampere to buy hardware for development and testing purposes.

Ampere indeed held a financing round in April, which included Arm as a new investor, but Oracle wasn’t mentioned at the time.

Ampere was founded in 2017 and is developing a custom Armv8 CPU with 64 cores at 3.3GHz.