When Renee James and team launched semiconductor startup Ampere Computing, they knew that a cloud-native, high-performance, low-power chip would be a critical next step for the industry. They just weren’t sure what killer app would come along to help drive industry innovation.
The answer is more clear now. It's artificial intelligence.
AI applications like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion demand intense computing horsepower to train and run the language models that underly the technology. Ampere’s chips, it turns out, are a good match for those models, according to Chief Product Officer Jeff Wittich.
“Certainly we couldn’t have predicted ... it was going to be these large language models,” said Wittich. “But what we did know was that every couple of years you see another wave of compute and intensive applications. So whether that was going to be in the AI space or whether it was going to be in some new video service or AR/VR thing, I don’t think we quite knew. What we started building a couple of years ago turned out to be a really good match for exactly the types of models that generative AI is using.”
This week, Ampere is unveiling its latest processor family, dubbed AmpereOne. The newest product in the family began testing with customers last year. It is now in full production and selling today.
AmpereOne also marks the company’s shift to designing and selling chips that are made with Ampere-designed cores, which are the integrated circuit designs at the heart of the chip. The company’s other family of processors, Ampere Altra, use cores designed by Arm Ltd.
Ampere works with semiconductor contract manufacturer TSMC to make the chips and AmpereOne uses TSMC’s 5-nanometer node.
“The big strategic thing, which has a lot of technical benefits as well, is this is our own cores,” said Wittich. “We designed everything in the core that does all the processing, and the CPU we designed is completely from scratch. So, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple years is getting feedback from customers on what would have the biggest benefit to them.”
From the start Ampere has been focused on designing chips from the ground up that are built for cloud computing. This means high-performance and low-power usage.
As cloud usage grows the power needed for data centers is increasing. According to Ampere research, data centers are 2.5% to 3.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Plus, data centers are maxing out capacity and there are real challenges to building new data centers, so cloud infrastructure companies have to figure out how to get more within current footprints.
“It is time for us as an industry to meet the moment and embrace change,” said James in a written statement. “Our future growth as an industry depends on it. The cloud has ushered in a whole new world and approach to software development. Isn’t it time for the microprocessor to do the same?”
Ampere customers include Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Alibaba, as well as server manufacturers like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Supermicro.
Oracle is one of the company’s biggest shareholders and James sits on Oracle’s board. The tech giant has invested an estimated $850 million into Ampere. The latest infusion was last year when the company invested $300 million in convertible debt issued by Ampere, according to Oracle regulatory filings. Oracle also bought added equity in Ampere for $127.8 million from another investor.
Ampere has 250 Portland employees and 1,350 global employees. The company is based in Santa Clara, Calif., but its Pearl District office is growing. In fact, the company was the fastest-hiring local tech company over the last year with local headcount growing 25%, according to Business Journal research.
Wittich noted the company is continuing to hire.
“As we develop more products we need more engineers and designers and architects,” he said. “Portland is a great place to hire. And it’s a good opportunity to hire now and take advantage of current conditions.”
Ampere was founded and is led by James, who spent decades at semiconductor giant Intel Corp. She was president of Intel when she left in 2016. Ampere's leadership team includes other Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) veterans.
Ampere filed confidential paperwork for an IPO last year and, as James told the Business Journal in August, the plan is to move the IPO forward as soon as the market settles.
