Broadcom, the new owner of VMware, used the VMware Explore conference a few weeks back to announce something big: its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform is now AI-native.
This move is part of Broadcom’s attempt to keep up with the tech industry’s race toward AI and large language models. But the announcement also comes while the company is dealing with plenty of negative press. Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has faced backlash over licensing policy changes that have frustrated long-time users.
The shutdown of VMware’s free tier, pushy sales tactics to keep customers locked in, and even a handful of lawsuits over existing agreements—especially perpetual licenses—have left many IT leaders wondering if it’s time to walk away. Rivals like Nutanix, SUSE, and IBM have all been picking up customers who’ve had enough.
That said, VMware sits at the heart of many enterprise IT stacks, and moving away isn’t easy. Workloads in heavily virtualized environments don’t just migrate cleanly—switching can mean big costs, risks to uptime, and headaches with performance. For many organizations, it’s safer (and sometimes cheaper) to stick with the “devil you know.”
Adding AI into VMware’s core products carries the same risks. Rebuilding parts of the platform to fully embed AI could destabilize existing environments. The deeper the changes, the bigger the chance of breaking something critical—and in IT, even small stumbles can ripple into big problems for customers.
For now, Broadcom’s pitch is about making AI easier to use inside VMware environments. Starting next year, VCF 9 subscribers will get VMware Private AI Services—a bundle with everything needed to run AI on-premises or outside big cloud providers. It’ll include a model store (likely stocked with open-source, lightweight models for testing), indexing services, vector databases, an AI agent builder, and an API gateway to let different models “talk” to each other smoothly.
At the conference, the message was clear: AI is only going to become more important in the enterprise. So VMware wants it to be part of every infrastructure that runs on its platform. Still, what Broadcom revealed is more of a cautious step than a bold leap. Alongside the AI news, it also announced updates to the VMware Tanzu Platform, including easier publishing of MCP servers and the launch of a new lakehouse tool called Tanzu Data Intelligence.
One of the simpler new features is Intelligent Assist for VCF, an AI-powered chatbot that taps into VMware’s knowledge base. The idea is to give users faster answers while reducing the number of cases that escalate to human support.
The buzz around containers once had many people predicting the end of traditional virtualization—just like the cloud was supposed to kill off on-premise databases (and Oracle). But in reality, enterprises have too much legacy infrastructure invested in these systems. Even with steep licensing fees and high operational costs, most organizations double down rather than rip everything out.
That’s why, despite the AI “fairy dust” sprinkled on its latest offerings, Broadcom knows its real money-maker is the simple fact that VMware remains deeply embedded in the enterprise.
