VMware’s AI Innovation Roars With Nvidia, AMD, Tanzu And VCF New Offerings
‘The fact that VMware is really following through on their commitment to build out VMware Cloud Foundation to support AI is fantastic for us,’ says Bob Olwig of VMware partner and channel powerhouse World Wide Technology.
“The fact that VMware is really following through on their commitment to build out VMware Cloud Foundation to support AI is fantastic for us,” said Bob Olwig, executive vice president of global partner alliances for $20 billion channel powerhouse World Wide Technology.
“For many customers, they want to understand how VMware can support AI. So I’m really thrilled VMware is building in AI services into the platform. First of all, that’s more value to the customer, but it also allows them— in an environment that they’re already familiar with and likely have been using for decades— to build out generative AI use cases and applications,” said Olwig. “That helps customers accelerate their AI adoption.”
[Related: Broadcom CEO At VMware Explore: VCF ‘Now Outperforms Public Cloud]
VMware’s New AI Tech ‘Just Makes A Lot Of Sense’
At VMware Explore 2025 this week, the cloud software superstar unveiled that a new private AI as-a-service will become a standard component of VCF 9.0.
These native AI services—which includes GPU Monitoring, Model Store, Model Runtime, Agent Builder, Vector Database, and Data Indexing/Retrieval service—aim to boost privacy and security, simplify infrastructure, and streamline AI model deployment.
VMware also launched a new VMware Cloud Foundation Intelligent Assist that diagnoses and resolves issues fast by quickly accessing Broadcom’s knowledge base for solutions to reduce downtime.
WWT’s Olwig said some customers are looking to enable their core capabilities via AI assistants.
“Because customers work within the VMware environment day in and day out, managing those operations, AI assistants are essentially ways to automate and help those operators do their job better and make them more productive,” Olwig said. “I love to see a leading company like VMware adopt it and showcase how AI in real world scenario can help benefit the operations people within an organization. It just makes a lot of sense.”
Additionally, VMware created new Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for VCF to provide governance and security for MCP. It provides customers with a standardized method to integrate AI assistants with internal content repositories and external tools such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, ServiceNow, GitHub, Slack and PostgreSQL without building and maintaining custom connectors.
AI Collaboration With Nvidia And AMD
At VMware Explore, Broadcom unveiled a partnership with AMD to advance enterprise AI infrastructure.
Customers can now leverage VCF with AMD ROCm Enterprise AI software and AMD Instinct MI350 Series GPUs to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) and deploy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows.
Additionally, the new collaborations allow it to run inference workloads within the two companies’ data centers to address concerns related to privacy, choice, cost, performance, and compliance.
On the Nvidia front, VCF will now support Nvidia’s Blackwell Architecture GPUs, engineered for AI training, inference, and high-performance computing at scale.
This includes support for Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Server GPUs and Blackwell B200 GPUs, while VCF will incorporate support for Nvidia ConnectX-7 NICs and Nvidia BlueField-3 400GDPUs with DirectPath I/O.
“With Nvidia networking technology and Blackwell GPUs, enterprises can build and deploy powerful AI applications directly within their existing private cloud, using the full capabilities of the Nvidia platform in combination with VMware Cloud Foundation,” said Nvidia’s Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI, in a statement.
VMware Tanzu Gets Major AI Boost
Outside of VCF and AI partnerships, VMware also launched its new VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence, a data lakehouse platform that provides unified, low-latency access to multimodal data at scale to drive more secure analytics, applications, and agentic AI.
VMware Tanzu Data integrates ingestion, processing, querying, and AI enablement into a single solution. It has embedded support for predictive AI models, vector processing, and agentic workflows to help developers and data scientists to build GenAI-powered applications faster.
VMware also introduced the VMware Tanzu Platform 10.3, which accelerates the safe development and integration of generative AI (GenAI) capabilities into both new and existing enterprise applications. New innovation on the platform includes new AI model quota capabilities and architectural updates for broader integration via webhooks, enable platform teams’ greater control, security, and cost management for private and public AI models.
“This whole agentic and AI era is really all about developers and architects leveraging AI tools within their development environment. For VMware to make enhancements to Tanzu to reduce that friction that developers have is a big positive,” said WWT’s Olwig.
“I don’t think you can ever go wrong as an ISV or a platform company like VMware catering to developers and helping them build line of business applications that are important,” he said. “VMware is just making it easier for customers to start unlocking the opportunity and the value that AI can bring.”
VMware Explore 2025 is taking place this week in Las Vegas.