Groups urge EU interim measures against Broadcom amid VMware antitrust case

Broadcom’s VMware licensing overhaul isn’t just a pricing shift—it’s a strategic overreach that has alarmed Europe’s cloud ecosystem. Technically, it pressures CSPs to decouple from VMware’s stack, accelerating adoption of open-source hypervisors like KVM and eroding Broadcom’s x86 infrastructure lock-in. From a compliance standpoint, EU interim measures would drastically increase Broadcom’s legal exposure and operational friction across the bloc, especially as U.S. antitrust scrutiny intensifies. Competitors like Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle are likely to fast-track proprietary virtualization layers, while NVIDIA could leverage its AI infrastructure momentum to offer alternatives. Over the next 12–24 months, this case will fuel Europe’s ‘digital sovereignty’ agenda, pushing semiconductor firms to reassess vertical integration in light of regulatory red lines—making the virtualization layer a new fault line in tech geopolitics.