CEO Rajiv Ramaswami explains AMD’s new $250 million partnership and investment with Nutanix, and continuing to win over Broadcom-VMware customers.
Nutanix’s CEO added more details Wednesday about the company’s new AMD partnership—which includes AMD pledging $100 million in R&D and $150 million in Nutanix stock—as well as its attempts to win over VMware-Broadcom customers.
“Broadcom is focused on continuing to protect their largest customers and trying to lock in people as much as they can,” said CEO Rajiv Ramaswami during a media Q&A session after the company’s second fiscal quarter earnings call.
“People don’t necessarily think of Broadcom as a long-term partner for them,” he said. “Largely, I would say they are shedding customers. … We are still continuing to add new customers at a healthy clip. We added 1,000-plus customers this last quarter. Our AHV percentage, which is our hypervisor adoption, has hit an all-time high.”
[Related: Broadcom ‘Removal’ Of VMware Partner Tier Set For May In EMEA]
CRN reached out to Broadcom for comment but did not hear back by press time.
In a blockbuster announcement on Wednesday, Nutanix unveiled a new partnership with AMD in which Nutanix’s cloud and Kubernetes platforms will integrate with AMD’s Enterprise AI software and accelerated compute hardware.
“The target customer base really are enterprise customers,” Ramaswami said, referring to the Nutanix-AMD targeted customers.
“Within that enterprise customer base, it would be typically customers in more regulated industries, customers who care about sovereignty wanting to run their AI close to where their data is located,” he said.
AMD committed a whopping $100 million investment in R&D with the new Nutanix partnership, as well as the purchase of $150 million worth of Nutanix common stock.
“[A new Nutanix-AMD] solution is going to be in the market at the end of this year,” he said.
Before jumping into Ramaswami’s in-depth discussion on Broadcom-VMware competition and its new blockbuster AMD partnership, let’s take a quick look at Nutanix’s financial earnings report this week.
Nutanix Q2 2026 Earnings Results
Nutanix generated $723 million in revenue during its second fiscal quarter 2026, up 10 percent year over year.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company reported operating income of $189 million, representing a $28 million income increase year over year. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) for Nutanix was $2.36 billion in Q2 2026, up 16 percent year over year.
Here is what every Nutanix partner, investor and customer needs to know about Ramaswami’s AMD plans and besting VMware competition — all in his own words.
Broadcom ‘Trying To Lock In’ Customers; Broadcom Not A ‘Long-Term Partner’
If you look at Broadcom, Broadcom is focused on continuing to protect their largest customers and trying to lock in people as much as they can.
I don’t think a whole lot has changed. We continue to eat away at that.
It’s really your multiyear cycles here, right? There’s people who sit and plan migrations. This quarter, one of the largest asset managers in the world—a global 2000 company—decided to bring us in, do a migration [from Broadcom-VMware to Nutanix], and they’ve just starting that migration. So we see a lot of that happening now.
People don’t necessarily think of Broadcom as a long-term partner for them.
Customers are at various stages. Some of them are saying, ‘Well, I have no choice, but I’m stuck with them for some period of time.’
Others are saying, ‘Well, that may be case, but I’m looking to migrate and I want to get out before my next renewal.’
So that’s a Broadcom situation. Largely, I would say they are shedding customers.
Now, where are those customers going? We’re capturing some of them.
We are still continuing to add new customers at a healthy clip. We added 1,000-plus customers this last quarter. Our AHV percentage, which is our hypervisor adoption, has hit an all-time high.
Red Hat Winning ‘Some’ VMware
Red Hat is winning some [VMware customers] now.
With Red Hat, they obviously have a very strong container platform, but they’re also now selling Kubernetes-based virtualization in the market.
We have not seen many successful migrations of enterprise workloads from VMware into Red Hat’s virtualization platform. So we’ve not seen that.
I think for containers, if somebody wants to go containerize and modernize—it’s a great platform. They are the market leader in OpenShift.
VMware Customers Going To Public Cloud With Nutanix And AWS
On the public clouds, there’s people who are doing cloud migrations, and in some cases they go natively to the public cloud when it’s competitive for us.
In other cases, we are able to go in with the public cloud providers, like AWS where we have a good partnership, and go in and tell them, ‘This is the best and easiest way for you to migrate from your current provider, VMware, to a new solution.’
And that can be on-premise or can be in the public cloud, and we can work with AWS together to make that happen.
We’ve extended our partnership with AWS post this Broadcom-VMware acquisition, and we’re seeing some good traction.
AMD Invests $150 Million In Nutanix Stock And $100 Million In R&D
Our strategic partnership with AMD focuses on the growth opportunity in agentic AI.
This multiyear collaboration is focused on development and marketing of a Nutanix-powered agentic AI platform for enterprises and service providers built on AMD accelerated compute infrastructure.
As part of the agreement, AMD will make a strategic investment of $150 million in Nutanix common stock and fund up to $100 million for R&D and go-to-market for the combined solutions.
We look forward to delivering the first jointly developed platform from this partnership to our customers in late 2026.
Nutanix And AMD’s Target Customer Base
The target is we are building a platform together that supports essentially inferencing and agentic applications.
So this would be a full stack platform on top of which people could use run models and build these multi-agent applications or even simpler inferencing applications.
The target customer base really are enterprise customers. Within that enterprise customer base, it would be typically customers in more regulated industries, customers who care about sovereignty wanting to run their AI close to where their data is located.
It could also mean people who are running AI applications at the edge.
So if you were to look at this set of customer base, it translates into is people who care about protecting their data, running it locally, running it inside their data centers for the most part, running it in edges.
But also some subset of these customers are going to consume them from service providers. We have a lot of service providers these days who are also offering GPU as a service. So that would be the second way of serving the same end customer being the enterprise.
What AMD’s $100 Million R&D Investments Will Go Toward
The solution is the Nutanix software stack running on servers that include AMD’s accelerated compute platform.
By the way, we already have solutions in the market today with Nvidia on this front. In fact, all our AI solutions today run on Nvidia, and now we are adding AMD to the mix to provide more choice for customers.
So the go-to-market model is that we sell our software, the full stack, which is our Nutanix Cloud Platform, our Kubernetes platform and then our NAI–the Nutanix AI piece that runs on top of all of that.
The R&D effort is to take all of that, get it to work very nicely and optimally on AMD hardware. That’s inside the servers, AMD’s GPU hardware and accelerated compute hardware.
So we sell our software just like we sell today. And more of that software will land on platforms that have AMD hardware inside. So that is the go-to-market collaboration.
Now revenue-wise, the solution is going to be in the market at the end of this year. We expect to start seeing small amounts of revenue next calendar year or in the second half of our fiscal year 2027.
Nutanix’s ‘Goal’ With AMD Partnership
Our goal is to provide customer choice and bring to our customers a variety of underlying platforms.
There’s multiple underlying hardware platforms. Nvidia of course has been the market leader for quite a while here in the space.
AMD is the other big platform company when it comes to GPUs. Customers want choice across both.
You’ve seen how hard it has been to get ahold of Nvidia GPUs, for example, and then there’s pricing comparisons and so forth.
So there’s a lot of reasons why it’s good to have multiple providers in the market.
From a Nutanix perspective, we want to be able to support all the major providers and provide choice to our customers.
