Oracle grew its already substantial commitment to Ampere Computing, the cloud computing chip startup with deep Portland connections, in the past year.
Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) invested $400 million in convertible debt issued by Ampere and placed a $104.1 million pre-payment order for Ampere processors. It also bought $4.7 million worth of Ampere processors in the year ended May 31, according to an Oracle proxy statement filed last Friday and first reported by Reuters.
Ampere is based in Santa Clara, California, but has engineering offices in the Pearl District in Portland, where it employs some 250 people.
Ampere founder and CEO Renee James sits on Oracle’s board and Oracle is one of Ampere's biggest shareholders. Oracle's investment in Ampere was estimated at $850 million heading into the 2023 fiscal year.
Energy efficiency is key
Ampere makes server processors based on architecture from Arm Holdings, an energy-efficient alternative to the x86 technology used in chips from Intel and AMD. Oracle revealed in July that it was no longer buying Intel central processing units, instead turning to AMD and Ampere for CPUs.
Earlier last week, Oracle said it would offer services running on Ampere's new AmpereOne chip on its cloud. Clay Magouyrk, executive VP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Development, called it "a key milestone as OCI expands our foundational usage of Ampere processors."
"This next generation compute instance will provide unmatched core density, which is critical in delivering to the performance and sustainability needs of our customers," Magouyrk added in a prepared statement.
It was another win for Ampere after Alphabet in late August revealed AmpereOne was heading onto Google Cloud.
Ampere introduced the AmpereOne chip family in May. While still Arm-based, it marked a shift for the company to in-house-design of the chip cores, where the main processing happens. That allowed Ampere to improve performance and efficiency, the company said.
