Dive Brief:
- Walmart struck a deal with Broadcom to access VMware's private cloud and edge compute technologies, according to a Tuesday announcement. The retail giant will leverage VMware Cloud Foundation to unify its globally distributed operations, Broadcom said.
- The strategic partnership will add scalability to the retailer’s compute and storage capabilities, streamlining infrastructure operations, automating security updates and centralizing software, according to the release.
- Walmart is the largest enterprise customer to publicly adopt Broadcom’s newest version of VMware’s private cloud bundle — VCF 9 — since the platform became generally available in June. Nearly all of the Fortune 500 companies and 87% of Broadcom’s 10,000 largest VMware customers are adopting VCF, according to a separate Broadcom announcement Tuesday.
Dive Insight:
Walmart’s commitment to VCF follows a tumultuous push by Broadcom to migrate existing VMware customers to the private cloud platform, following the chipmaker’s $61 billion acquisition of the virtualization software provider in November 2023.
The strategy caused consternation among customers accustomed to VMware's a la carte software menu, as Broadcom winnowed nearly 9,000 distinct offerings down to four large bundles. As part of the abrupt shift, the company phased out perpetual licenses in favor of a subscription-based model that increased VMware costs for many customers.
AT&T said its bill for 75,000 virtual machines running across approximately 8,600 servers was set to spike by more than 1,050% in documents filed with the New York State Supreme Court last year. The legal dispute with Broadcom was settled in November.
Broadcom countered customer cost concerns with a series of VMware upgrades, added edge compute capabilities and improved security features with VCF 5.2 in June 2024. Two months later, the company promised public cloud scalability and automation dashboards when it unveiled VCF 9 under preview. Broadcom also added Nvidia-powered AI to VCF 5.2 last year.
The VCF suite has continued to expand as the vendor courts Walmart-size customers.
Broadcom inked a partnership with open source security provider Canonical to bring secure containers to the platform Tuesday. The company will also integrate Nvidia’s latest Blackwell processors into VCF and beef up the platform’s agentic AI toolkit with the VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence data lakehouse, according to two additional announcements, delivered during the VMware Explore 2025 event in Las Vegas Tuesday.
