Broadcom software chief says Arm servers won’t hit enterprise mainstream for several years

Ram Velaga, who took charge of Broadcom’s enterprise software unit at the start of the year, addressed the future of Arm servers during VMware’s Explore event in Las Vegas. He projected that Arm-based servers will not capture a meaningful share of the enterprise market for at least three to five years, citing limited customer interest and the dominance of x86 virtualization. VMware continues to support x86 for servers, storage and networking, though it has built a hypervisor variant for Arm-based SmartNICs used in its distributed services engine.

A preview of an Arm server hypervisor was recently released, but Velaga said there is no rush to expand it. He also dismissed any current demand for RISC-V chips, indicating the platform will be considered only if market conditions change. Broadcom’s R&D budget of $5 billion is split roughly 60 % on maintaining VMware’s existing portfolio and the remainder on new initiatives such as the recently announced AI factory.