SoftBank Group said Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a startup that designed an Arm-based server chip, for $6.5 billion. The company expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025, according to a statement.

Carlyle Group and Oracle both have committed to selling their stakes in Ampere, SoftBank said.

Ampere will operate as an independent subsidiary and will keep its headquarters in Santa Clara, California, the statement said.

“Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision, and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the United States,” SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son was quoted as saying in the statement.

The startup has 1,000 semiconductor engineers, SoftBank said in a separate statement.

Chips that use Arm’s instruction set represent an alternative to chips based on the x86 architecture, which Intel and AMD sell. Arm-based chips often consume less energy. Ampere’s founder and CEO, Renee James, established the startup in 2017 after 28 years at Intel, where she rose to the position of president.

Leading cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services offers Graviton Arm chip for rent that have become popular among large customers. In October, Microsoft started selling access to its own Cobalt 100 Arm-based cloud computing instances.

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At the end of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s unscripted two-hour keynote on Tuesday, his message was clear: Get the fastest chips that the company makes.

Speaking at Nvidia’s GTC conference, Huang said that questions clients have about the cost and return on investment the company’s graphics processors, or GPUs, will go away with faster chips that can be digitally sliced and used to serve artificial intelligence to millions of people at the same time.

“Over the next 10 years, because we could see improving performance so dramatically, speed is the best cost-reduction system,” Huang said in a meeting with journalists shortly after his GTC keynote.

The company dedicated 10 minutes during Huang’s speech to explain the economics of faster chips for cloud providers, complete with Huang doing envelope math out loud on each chip’s cost-per-token, a measure of how much it costs to create one unit of AI output.

Huang told reporters that he presented the math because that’s what’s on the mind of hyperscale cloud and AI companies.

The company’s Blackwell Ultra systems, coming out this year, could provide data centers 50 times more revenue than its Hopper systems because it’s so much faster at serving AI to multiple users, Nvidia says. 

Investors worry about whether the four major cloud providers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle — could slow down their torrid pace of capital expenditures centered around pricey AI chips. Nvidia doesn’t reveal prices for its AI chips, but analysts say Blackwell can cost $40,000 per GPU.

Already, the four largest cloud providers have bought 3.6 million Blackwell GPUs, under Nvidia’s new convention that counts each Blackwell as 2 GPUs. That’s up from 1.3 million Hopper GPUs, Blackwell’s predecessor, Nvidia said Tuesday. 

The company decided to announce its roadmap for 2027’s Rubin Next and 2028’s Feynman AI chips, Huang said, because cloud customers are already planning expensive data centers and want to know the broad strokes of Nvidia’s plans. 

“We know right now, as we speak, in a couple of years, several hundred billion dollars of AI infrastructure” will be built, Huang said. “You’ve got the budget approved. You got the power approved. You got the land.”

Huang dismissed the notion that custom chips from cloud providers could challenge Nvidia’s GPUs, arguing they’re not flexible enough for fast-moving AI algorithms. He also expressed doubt that many of the recently announced custom AI chips, known within the industry as ASICs, would make it to market.

“A lot of ASICs get canceled,” Huang said. “The ASIC still has to be better than the best.”

Huang said his is focus on making sure those big projects use the latest and greatest Nvidia systems.

“So the question is, what do you want for several $100 billion?” Huang said.

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Microsoft said Wednesday that company veteran Amy Coleman will become its new executive vice president and chief people officer, succeeding Kathleen Hogan, who has held the position for the past decade.

Hogan will remain an executive vice president but move to a newly established Office of Strategy and Transformation, which is an expansion of the office of the CEO. She will join Microsoft’s group of top executives, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.

Coleman is stepping into a major role, given that Microsoft is among the largest employers in the U.S., with 228,000 total employees as of June 2024. She has worked at the company for more than 25 years over two stints, having first joined as a compensation manager in 1996.

Hogan will remain on the senior leadership team.

“Amy has led HR for our corporate functions across the company for the past six years, following various HR roles partnering across engineering, sales, marketing, and business development spanning 25 years,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.

“In that time, she has been a trusted advisor to both Kathleen and to me as she orchestrated many cross-company workstreams as we evolved our culture, improved our employee engagement model, established our employee relations team, and drove enterprise crisis response for our people,” he wrote.

Hogan arrived at Microsoft in 2003 after being a development manager at Oracle and a partner at McKinsey. Under Hogan, some of Microsoft’s human resources practices evolved. She has emphasized the importance of employees having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, drawing on concepts from psychologist Carol Dweck.

“We came up with some big symbolic changes to show that we really were serious about driving culture change, from changing the performance-review system to changing our all-hands company meeting, to our monthly Q&A with the employees,” Hogan said in a 2019 interview with Business Insider.

Hogan pushed for managers to evaluate the inclusivity of employees and oversaw changes in the handling of internal sexual harassment cases.

Coleman had been Microsoft’s corporate vice president for human resources and corporate functions for the past four years. In that role, she was responsible for 200 HR workers and led the development of Microsoft’s hybrid work approach, as well as the HR aspect of the company’s Covid response, according to her LinkedIn profile.