Ram Velaga, president of Broadcom's enterprise software division, has said that Arm-based processors will not gain significant market share in the enterprise for at least three to five years, dampening expectations for hardware makers pushing Arm servers. This matters because VMware, the dominant enterprise server virtualisation platform, still only virtualises x86 servers, meaning businesses cannot readily adopt Arm machines without turning them into an unsupported, isolated silo within their infrastructure.

Speaking at VMware's Explore conference in Las Vegas, Velaga said VMware's mission to act as an "abstraction layer" for CPUs and GPUs regardless of instruction set would continue, though there is no urgency to build a full Arm server hypervisor given the slow adoption timeline. VMware already supports Arm-based processors in SmartNICs via its distributed services engine and has previewed early Arm server hypervisor technology, but Velaga said customers show no interest in RISC-V chips. He also revealed that around 60 percent of Broadcom software's $5 billion annual R&D budget maintains existing VMware products, with the remainder going towards new offerings such as its newly announced "AI factory".