(Reuters) -SoftBank Group Corp said on Wednesday it would acquire Ampere Computing, a U.S. chip startup founded by the former president of Intel that is increasingly focused on artificial intelligence, in a $6.5 billion all-cash deal.

Ampere makes data center central processing unit (CPU) chips based on a computing architecture from Arm Holdings that are used by firms such as Oracle in their cloud computing infrastructure.

As part of the deal, Ampere's biggest investors, Oracle and Carlyle Group ( CG ), will sell their respective positions in the company, SoftBank said in a statement.

Founded in 2018 by Intel veteran Renee James, Ampere built CPUs with its own custom computing core technology, a step usually only taken by much larger firms like Apple or Qualcomm.

But Arm ultimately became a competitor as it sought to work directly with customers such as Microsoft and Google to help them build their own custom Arm-based CPUs.

Google had adopted Ampere's chips, but a year later after Google worked with Arm to develop its own "Axon" CPU, a Google executive told Reuters it would not be deploying more Ampere chips.

Under SoftBank's ownership, Ampere will be a stable mate of Arm in the Japanese conglomerate's growing collection of chip technology companies that are boosting their focus on AI. SoftBank is the majority owner of Arm.

"With a shared vision for advancing AI, we are excited to join SoftBank Group and partner with its portfolio of leading technology companies," James said in a statement. "This is a fantastic outcome for our team, and we are excited to drive forward our AmpereOne roadmap for high performance Arm processors and AI."