Brussels, 3rd September 2026. Announcements at this week’s VMware event in Las Vegas confirm that Broadcom intends to extend its dominance of the virtualisation market into the management of enterprise AI. Across the industry it is increasingly clear that whoever owns the control plane – not the models, not the data – will dominate the AI economy. Broadcom’s move to capture that layer should be read in exactly those terms.
Presented as a route to control and trust over AI agents, the VMware Private AI Cloud is in substance a further tightening of the restrictions on customer choice that are already the subject of formal complaints before the European Commission. Customers should ask themselves if they trust Broadcom with their AI stack.
Broadcom has cut its partner channel to low single digits in most European countries, imposed price increases that independent analysts put at multiples of previous licence costs, and changed contract terms unilaterally to suit its own agenda. Extending that same commercial model into enterprise on-premises AI does not answer the concerns the Commission is now examining – it heightens them, by adding a new and fast-growing class of workloads to an existing dependency.
Customers should be equally clear-eyed about pricing. AI capability is bundled into the platform today, “price included”. The pattern is familiar: functionality is included until the installed base is captive, and then it is metered and monetised separately. Those adopting Broadcom’s in-house AI tools should expect the price rises to follow – this time on their AI workloads as well.
Nor does a “sovereign” label change the analysis. Sovereignty is determined by who controls the licences, the terms and the roadmap – not by where a stack happens to be deployed. A platform whose vendor has repeatedly rewritten its terms unilaterally, and without meaningful recourse for customers, cannot credibly anchor Europe’s sovereign AI infrastructure.
The lesson of the mainframe era is that markets change not when existing workloads migrate, but when new workloads stop arriving. Europe’s message should therefore be simple. For existing infrastructure: if you are in a hole, stop digging – place new workloads on sovereign European clouds. For AI: don’t start a new hole.
Customers already know the risk and cost of sudden and unprecedented changes to VMware licence terms – many are still paying it. They should not make the same mistake with their AI.
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