Hot chip startup Ampere files for IPO

California-based chipmaker Ampere confidentially filed for an initial public offering on April 11, when it submitted a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Founded by the former Intel president Renée James in 2017, Ampere designs fabless server processors based on Arm architectures. It is riding a strong wave of recent demand thanks to its latest Altra and Altra Max CPUs, which are designed for the data centre based on the Arm Neoverse N1 architecture. It counts the likes of ByteDance, Cloudflare, Equinix, Oracle, and Tencent as customers of its processors.

Microsoft also recently announced the public preview of its new Azure virtual machines powered by the Arm-based Ampere Altra server processors. The VM series includes the general-purpose Dpsv5 and memory-optimized Epsv5 virtual machines, which Microsoft claims can deliver up to 50% better price-performance than comparable IBM x86-based VMs.

By filing confidentially, Ampere does not have to make significant disclosures into its financial performance and operations until 15 days before the public offering and has greater flexibility in when it decides to float, if at all.

Softbank-owned chip designer Arm is also expected to go public this year after its proposed acquistion by Nvidia was called off.