Broadcom vs. Brussels shows what sovereignty actually means

It is now very late in the day, but a fully open software, and even hardware, stack is still worth pursuing

A US chip giant has restructured the European cloud market by flipping a licensing switch. Brussels is still assessing the paperwork, says Jason Walsh

This article was originally published by TechCentral on 20 March 2026

On 31 March a deadline passes that most people outside the cloud computing industry will never hear about: Broadcom, the American semiconductor giant that acquired virtualisation platform VMware in 2023 for $69 billion (approx. €60 billion), has closed the VMware Cloud Service Provider programme, a licensing arrangement under which hundreds of smaller European cloud companies were authorised to sell VMware-based services to their customers. 

After that date, only a select handful of approved resellers will remain. Everyone else? They lose the ability to sell new VMware subscriptions, and must either hand customers to an approved reseller – or migrate them away. 

Fighting back, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) this week filed a competition complaint against Broadcom calling for “interim measures to halt Broadcom’s ongoing abuse”. 

According to one report, in Britain alone the closure leaves only around nine cloud service providers standing, while in the US the number of authorised resellers has fallen from thousands to just 19.

This is not a story about a product being discontinued. Rather, it is a story about what happens when software becomes infrastructure and infrastructure becomes a chokehold.

Moreover, the CISPE complaint, filed on Thursday 19 March, is worth examining as a thing in itself. It is not the first: a German association representing large IT customers filed a similar complaint in May 2025, 10 months ago, and the 31 March deadline is now a fortnight away.

The new filing explicitly requests that any interim measures include protections against retaliation, because affected providers are, by CISPE’s own account, afraid to speak publicly for fear of the consequences. The Dutch Cloud Community director has described a market in which dissent has led to “threats, retaliation and ostracism”. Costs, meanwhile, have risen by more than 1,000% since the acquisition, it notes. 

Deep tech

The CISPE has even launched a public campaign under the address dontbebullied.cispe.cloud, which is an unusual move for a trade body and tells you something about how far outside normal commercial behaviour its members believe this to be.

Partner programmes and licensing terms tend to get filed under administrative detail, the sort of thing that fills out press releases without troubling readers, let alone journalists. The problem is, the ‘boring’ framing suits the entities that use them as instruments of market control. 

In essence, what Broadcom stands accused of is levying a toll on an entire tier of the European cloud market: prices rose tenfold after the VMware acquisition, payment is now demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of need, and minimum commitments are calculated on potential consumption rather than actual use. 

In this context, the programme’s closure is the final move in a sequence of decisions that has had the effect of concentrating distribution in the hands of a smaller, more manageable group of intermediaries.

The obvious question is whether affected providers can simply migrate to open source alternatives such as KVM, Proxmox, and OpenStack. Technically, they can. 

In practice, though, existing customer workloads are built against VMware’s specific APIs, tooling and management layer. Moving them means rewriting or repackaging, retesting everything, and managing cutover without dropping production systems for hundreds of enterprise clients, each with its own configuration. Customers must also agree, plan, test and sign off individually. Enterprise customers are rarely quick about this. 31 March is not a migration window; it’s barely enough time to have the conversation. 

The European Commission is “assessing the [CISPE] complaint in line with standard procedures”. By the time any remedy is conceivable, the ecosystem will have been restructured, smaller providers will likely have folded, desperately scrambled to migrate, or else just handed their customers to Broadcom’s chosen few.

It is now very late in the day, but a fully open software, and even hardware, stack is still worth pursuing

This is the pattern. In Europe, we are very good at building enforcement architecture, and considerably less good at deploying it before the damage is done. The AI Act, the GDPR, the Digital Markets Act are all serious instruments, all arriving after the structural decisions have been taken. Regulation as aftercare rather than prevention is not a bug in the system. At this point it looks rather like the design. 

It is now very late in the day, but a fully open software, and even hardware, stack is still worth pursuing. Virtualisation is just one example but an illustrative one: Europe says it wants cloud computing it can rely on. Broadcom is demonstrating what happens when you outsource sovereignty to other people’s licence terms.