Broadcom Announces VMware Telco Cloud Platform 9 to Drive Greater Hardware Efficiency for Sovereign-Ready Telco Infrastructure
BARCELONA, Spain, March 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2026 -- Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO), a global technology leader that designs, develops and supplies semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions, today unveiled the future of VMware Telco Cloud Platform, a private cloud platform for telco data centers designed to help global telco operators drive greater hardware efficiency and lower operational costs when delivering sovereign and AI services. VMware Telco Cloud Platform 9, built on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 with its own additional telco-specific capabilities, will empower telcos with a unified and horizontal infrastructure foundation to:
- Achieve an estimated five-year cumulative TCO savings of 40% compared to siloed architectures1;
- Lower power consumption and associated costs by an estimated 25–30% through improved server performance and VM density2;
- Achieve an estimated 38% lower memory and server TCO with Advanced NVMe Memory Tiering2;
- Reduce storage TCO by an estimated 38% with vSAN ESA Global Dedup2;
- Improve efficiency, governance and compliance through intelligent automation, integrated cost management, and proactive policy enforcement.
"Hardware costs are spiraling out of control, and the global demand for memory resulting from AI will further accelerate rising server prices. VMware Telco Cloud Platform, built on the industry's most widely-deployed private cloud platform technology, helps telcos dramatically reduce both their CAPEX and OPEX," said Paul Turner, chief product officer, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom. "VMware Telco Cloud Platform 9 will empower telco operators to deliver the secure, sovereign, AI-native infrastructure that drives next-gen technology adoption, revenue acceleration and lowers costs."
Empowering Telcos to Monetize AI
Telcos are evolving from providers of simple connectivity to offering sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure, leveraging distributed regional data centers to capture new revenue streams. VMware Telco Cloud Platform is evolving to support both 4G/5G Core network functions and data-intensive AI workloads on a unified and open platform, allowing operators to deliver sovereign cloud and AI. Planned capabilities to support better AI monetization in Telco Cloud Platform 9 will include:
- Private AI-as-a-Service: Inclusion of native tools, such as a Model Store, Model Runtime, and Vector Databases, will enable operators to offer turnkey AI environments to customers while ensuring strict data isolation and regulatory compliance.
- GPU Virtualization: The platform will maximize hardware efficiency and lower costs by partitioning single physical GPUs among multiple virtual machines. This will allow telcos to run high-performance workloads simultaneously—such AIOps for self-healing network management and Sovereign Edge applications for regulated industries—without needing dedicated hardware for every user.
- GPU-as-a-Service: A multi-tenant architecture will provide on-demand access to virtualized GPU power, allowing service providers to scale AI infrastructure efficiently and reduce operational costs while keeping proprietary data logically isolated.
- Enhanced GPU Monitoring: Real-time visibility into GPU and vGPU health will improve resource utilization and help eliminate the need for manual tracking.
- Automated Lifecycle Management (LCM): Built-in automation will allow platform teams to deploy production-ready private AI environments in minutes rather than weeks, eliminating manual setup and patching.
- Agent Builder Service: This low-code framework will simplify the creation of sophisticated AI agents by automating the orchestration of models, data retrieval, and tool-calling capabilities.
AI-Assisted Operations and Intelligent Automation Drive Telco Efficiency
As networks transition to an AI-native model, they must become both self-correcting and intent-based. VMware Telco Cloud Platform will provide the intelligent foundation required to automate lifecycle governance and optimize energy consumption across the 5G Core and eventually 6G. Operational efficiency enhancements currently planned for Telco Cloud Platform 9 include:
- Greater Hardware Efficiency:
- Advanced NVMe Memory Tiering: The platform will lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 40%2 by using high-speed NVMe storage to extend system memory, allowing for greater workload density without the high expense of traditional DRAM.
- Energy-Efficient Infrastructure: Support for new high-core-count CPUs and Intelligent Resource Scheduling will improve throughput-per-watt, optimizing power consumption for power-hungry 5G and AI applications.
- vSAN Global Deduplication: New storage efficiency capabilities will significantly reduce storage footprints by removing duplicate data blocks across the cluster, maximizing existing hardware value.
- Modernized Containers as a Service (CaaS) LCM: The platform will streamline Kubernetes operations with carrier-grade features like chained Kubernetes-to-Kubernetes upgrades, in-place configuration updates, and skip-level upgrades. With 24 months of support for every minor Kubernetes release, telcos are expected to reduce the frequency of maintenance windows and lower overall operational expenses (OpEx).
- Unified GitOps-Based Automation: Telcos will be able to choose between an ETSI-compliant approach or a unified GitOps "blueprint" using ArgoCD. This automation will automatically sync and update both network functions and cloud infrastructure from a single source of truth, eliminating manual setup errors and ensuring network-wide consistency.
- Unified Operations and Observability: A new centralized dashboard will offer a single pane of glass for fleet management, cost control, and licensing. This is paired with Network Fabric Observability (an add-on to Telco Cloud Platform) to correlate performance issues between physical and virtual layers from the mobile core to the far edge.
- Continuous Operations (Live Patching): ESX Live Patching will allow administrators to apply critical security updates to hosts without requiring maintenance windows or disrupting active virtual machines, making 100% network uptime achievable.
- AI-Assisted Operations: Intelligent assistants will help streamline platform onboarding and troubleshooting, providing actionable recommendations while maintaining a "human-in-the-loop" approach for critical decision-making.
Sovereign-Focused Compliance and Security
With the ever increasing rise of data and digital sovereignty laws, regulations and standards across the globe (e.g. the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, Gaia-X), the notion of building a sovereign cloud has shifted from a policy goal to a core business mandate in many jurisdictions and industry verticals, including telecommunications and critical infrastructure. The underlying requirements for any sovereign cloud are derived from the specific legal, policy, or guidelines applicable to the specific workloads and data at issue. VMware Telco Cloud Platform 9 will provide the architectural guardrails necessary to help customers ensure that cloud infrastructure remains a national asset and compliant with applicable sovereign cloud requirements—fully controlled, verified, and operated within local borders. Amongst other things, the following capabilities are currently planned for Telco Cloud Platform 9:
- In-Jurisdiction Operations and Sovereign Cloud Requirements: The platform will enable telcos to meet their sovereign cloud requirements, such as keep subscriber data, telemetry, and the management plane strictly within user-specified borders. Strengthened tenant isolation and granular access controls will help ensure network operations do not bypass national/regional jurisdiction.
- Cryptographic Authority: The platform will allow telcos to maintain exclusive control over encryption keys, ensuring only the local carrier—not a cloud provider or external entity—can access sensitive data.
- Audit-Grade Evidence: Integrated logging and automation tools will capture continuous, immutable proof of platform health. This automated ‘paper trail' will provide auditors with verifiable evidence of compliance in real-time.
- Automated Compliance and Policy Enforcement: Preconfigured hardening kits and an integrated Kubernetes policy manager based on Open Policy Agent (OPA) will allow telcos to enforce security policies aligned with their applicable laws, regulations and standards (e.g. the UK Telecommunications Security Act (TSA), NIST, NSA, and CISA guidelines), significantly reducing audit costs and time across massive cluster fleets.
- Centralized SecOps Dashboard: A unified interface will provide real-time visibility into security postures, automating drift detection to help telco operators proactively meet strict standards.
- Confidential Computing: Support for the latest secure enclaves from AMD and Intel will allow telcos to deploy sensitive workloads across heterogeneous infrastructure while maintaining hardware-level memory encryption.
- Distributed Lateral Security: VMware vDefend will provide advanced threat prevention and micro-segmentation, enabling zero-trust enforcement to block malicious lateral movement across the network.
Customer and Partner Commentary
"In today's interconnected world, reliable and robust telecommunications cloud infrastructure is paramount," said Greg McCall, Chief Networks Officer at BT. "VMware Telco Cloud Platform provides the flexibility, scalability, and reliability that BT needs to help to deliver award-winning mobile voice and messaging services across the UK. We are looking forward to continuing to build upon the success of our long-term partnership with Broadcom."
"The integration with VMware Telco Cloud Platform shows how Nokia's multi-cloud strategy helps telecommunication providers ensure requisite automation, security, resilience and scaling," said Kal De, senior vice president, core software, Nokia. "By using our cloud-native core network portfolio on VMware TCP, telcos can monetize their core networks with total confidence on the cloud platform of their choice, while reducing operational risk and accelerating time to market."
"Canonical is committed to making the benefits of reliable open source software a tangible reality for the telecommunications industry," said Ivan Ramos, Global Head of Telco at Canonical. "As part of our collaboration with Broadcom, we're optimizing the Linux operating system for VMware Telco Cloud Platform customers: Ubuntu helps reduce time to deployment, improves network function performance, enables simplified GPU deployment in air-gapped environments and natively runs AI/ML workloads - all on the same platform."
Additional Resources
- Read the VMware Telco Cloud Blog
- Learn more about VMware Telco Cloud Platform
1- "The Economic Benefits of Moving from Proprietary Cloud Silos to Horizontal Telco Cloud Networks," ACG Research, February 20, 2026
2- Based on internal Broadcom engineering estimates or test results, subject to change. March 2025.
About Broadcom
Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) is a technology leader that designs, develops, and supplies semiconductors and infrastructure software for global organizations' complex, mission-critical needs. Broadcom combines long-term R&D investment with superb execution to deliver the best technology, at scale. Broadcom is a Delaware corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. For more information, visit www.broadcom.com.
Broadcom, the pulse logo, and Connecting everything are among the trademarks of Broadcom. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc., and/or its subsidiaries. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Media Contact:
Roger T. Fortier
VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom
[email protected]
+1.408.348.1569
