T-Mobile wants a New York court to force Broadcom to keep supporting its VMware perpetual licenses. The company has tens of thousands of VMs running across 303,140 CPU cores. Moving that much infrastructure doesn’t happen overnight.
Here’s the backstory. T-Mobile bought perpetual VMware licenses in 2023 with two years of support and an option for a third. Then Broadcom bought VMware, killed perpetual licenses, and switched everyone to pricier subscriptions. When T-Mobile tried to buy that third year of support for $5.28 million, Broadcom said no.
A judge granted an injunction letting T-Mobile get support from October 2025 through August 3, 2026 — for that $5.28 million plus a $500,000 bond. T-Mobile wanted support so badly they offered $20 million for two years of updates.
Broadcom claims it’s already spent $24 million supporting six VMware products for T-Mobile and assigning three dedicated account managers. T-Mobile says it doesn’t even use three of those products and has opened only two service cases all year.
This isn’t isolated. AT&T privately settled a similar case against Broadcom over VMware pricing. Tesco is also suing — moving 40,000 server workloads off VMware. Broadcom argues most customers have migrated to subscriptions just fine. T-Mobile is the outlier.
The difference? Suing Broadcom is expensive. Smaller companies can’t afford it.
