Arm in the enterprise is at least three years away, says Broadcom software boss
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".
- Broadcom exec: Arm won't gain enterprise market share for 3-5 years
- VMware still only virtualises x86 servers, limiting Arm adoption
- 60% of $5bn R&D budget maintains existing VMware products
New here? Start with this
Arm processors are chips built on a different, more power-efficient design than the x86 chips (from Intel and AMD) that have long dominated business computing. Arm already powers most smartphones and is increasingly used in cloud data centres, and several hardware makers have been pushing Arm-based servers as a cheaper, greener alternative for large businesses.
Broadcom is a major technology company that, since acquiring VMware in 2023, controls the software most businesses use to run virtual machines – a way of making one physical server behave like many separate computers, which underpins most corporate IT systems. VMware's software has so far only worked with x86 chips, meaning a business wanting to use Arm servers currently cannot manage them through the same tools as the rest of its infrastructure, limiting how practical widespread Arm adoption is for large organisations.
Ram Velaga leads Broadcom's enterprise software division, which includes VMware, giving him a significant say over which chip technologies the company prioritises. His comments matter because Broadcom's decisions about VMware support can shape how quickly, or slowly, Arm chips move from niche use into mainstream corporate data centres.