Broadcom Private Cloud Outlook 2026: AI Tipping Point

Enterprise AI has moved past experimentation, and the production inference workloads that define the next decade of IT are landing decisively on private cloud infrastructure.

For CIOs and infrastructure leaders, the question is no longer whether to run AI in production, but where to run it cost-effectively, securely, and under organizational control. Broadcom's new Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report — based on a survey of 1,800 senior IT decision-makers across eight countries — documents a structural shift in how enterprises deploy AI, repatriate workloads, and respond to mounting public cloud waste and geopolitical pressure.

What was announced

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) published its Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a global research report conducted by Radius Tech in February–March 2026. The study captures how enterprises with 1,000 or more employees are rethinking AI infrastructure, public cloud spend, and data sovereignty. Key findings include:

• Production AI inferencing on private cloud: 56% of enterprises are running or planning to run it on private cloud, while public cloud share dropped 15 percentage points year over year, from 56% to 41%.
• New AI demands on IT: data protection and privacy (37%) and security and control (36%) lead the list.
• Cost overtakes security: 31% of IT leaders name cost as their top public cloud concern in 2026, up from 26% in 2025.
• Public cloud waste: 97% of IT leaders believe some public cloud spend is wasted, and 52% estimate waste exceeds 25% of total budget.
• Repatriation: 83% of enterprises are considering moving workloads back from public to private cloud; 50% have already done so.
• Geopolitics: four out of five IT leaders say geopolitics now affects IT strategy, with data sovereignty and residency (54%) overtaking jurisdiction-specific compliance (51%).

As enterprises move from pilots to running AI at production scale, infrastructure and operational costs spike, security gaps surface, and complexity compounds. The research is clear: enterprises increasingly prefer private cloud for production AI

Why this matters

For CIOs, CISOs, IT directors, and procurement leaders, the report quantifies a trend many have observed anecdotally: public cloud economics break down at AI production scale. Inference workloads run continuously, consume substantial GPU capacity, and process sensitive data — three factors that collide with consumption-based pricing, shared-tenancy security models, and cross-border data flows.

Cost predictability has jumped to the second largest driver of repatriation (39%), behind security and compliance (51%) and tied with performance (39%). Private cloud spend intent is growing at twice the rate of public cloud — up 21 points versus 10 points over a three-year outlook — and 58% of IT leaders now name building new workloads on private cloud as a top priority, up from 53% one year ago.

For regulated industries — financial services, public sector, healthcare, and life sciences — the combination of AI-driven data volumes, sovereignty mandates, and unpredictable public cloud bills makes the business case for private cloud infrastructure such as VMware Cloud Foundation increasingly compelling.

Technical details

• Survey scope: 1,800 senior IT decision-makers at enterprises with 1,000+ employees across eight countries in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
• Fieldwork: February–March 2026, conducted by Radius Tech in partnership with Broadcom.
• Workload focus: production AI inferencing, model training, generative and agentic AI deployment patterns.
• Top AI concerns: 62% of IT leaders are very or extremely concerned about infrastructure costs of running generative and agentic AI.
• Repatriation drivers: security and compliance (51%), cost predictability (39%), performance (39%).
• Geopolitical factors: data sovereignty and residency requirements (54%), jurisdiction-specific compliance (51%).
• Reference platform: VMware Cloud Foundation as a private cloud foundation for production AI, sovereign data control, and predictable economics.

Softprom and VMware by Broadcom

Softprom is the official distributor of VMware by Broadcom. Our team helps enterprises design, deploy, and operate private cloud environments based on VMware Cloud Foundation, with a focus on production AI workloads, data sovereignty, and total cost of ownership.

This content was prepared as part of the Softprom DistriFlow project — an automated system for monitoring and adapting vendor news. Original source: original article.