Ampere and Qualcomm aren't the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm's largest

Ampere Computing on Thursday said it was pairing its chips with those from Qualcomm in a new offering aimed at lowering the power bills from operating artificial intelligence chips.

Ampere announced its AmpereOne chip family will grow to 256 cores. And the company will also work with Qualcomm on cloud AI accerlators.

Ampere Computing LLC, the chip startup backed by Oracle Corp., is teaming up with Qualcomm Inc. to make equipment for artificial intelligence computing — an area currently dominated by Nvidia Corp.

Ampere is an agnostic, Arm-based chip developer that has forged strong partnerships with public cloud infrastructure giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp., helping them to design their own, proprietary data center processors. For instance, Ampere worked with AWS to design that company’s Graviton chips.

Ampere, in an annual report, picks up on the theme it hit hard a year ago as the realization began to grow that ubiquitous AI, for all its possible benefits, could bring overwhelming energy demand.

Ampere has begun shipping 192-core AmpereOne processors with an eight-channel DDR5 memory subsystem it introduced a year ago. Later this year, the company plans to introduce 192-core AmpereOne CPUs with a 12-channel DDR5 memory subsystem, requiring a brand-new platform.

The Semiconductor Company, Ampere Computing, announced on Thursday that it teamed up with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. to develop a joint solution for AI inferencing using Qualcomm Technologies’ high-performance, low-power Qualcomm® Cloud AI 100 inference solutions and Ampere CPUs.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) is working with semiconductor startup Ampere Computing in an effort to create artificial intelligence chips for the cloud that reduce the amount of energy used by traditional offerings.