T-Mobile sues Broadcom to keep VMware support for tens of thousands of VMs

T-Mobile is asking a New York court to decide that Broadcom must keep supporting the company’s VMware perpetual licenses, even as T-Mobile works on moving workloads off VMware. The filing puts hard scale around the stakes: T-Mobile says it has tens of thousands of virtual machines using VMware software across approximately 303,140 CPU cores.

This is not just a “we’re exploring options” story. T-Mobile says it is migrating off VMware, but it also argues that the process is time-consuming and technically difficult, especially because it involves migrating over 1,000 applications. In other words, T-Mobile’s legal ask is a business demand for continuity: it wants VMware perpetual licenses to continue being supported while the migration, with all its dependencies and integration complexity, plays out.

The lawsuit was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in August 2025, according to Ars Technica, with the report first picked up by The Register and a PDF of the filing referenced in the article. The motion is essentially a contract interpretation bet. T-Mobile’s complaint says Broadcom was contractually obligated to continue supporting T-Mobile’s VMware perpetual licenses, and it is asking the court to rule in its favor on that obligation.

To understand why decision-makers should care, you have to know how perpetual licensing and ongoing support work in enterprise infrastructure. Perpetual licenses typically aim to let customers use software indefinitely, but the operational reality is that support, updates, and related obligations can become the part that determines whether the software stays safe and viable. When a vendor relationship shifts, the customer risk does not always show up immediately in a bill. It shows up later in security posture, operational risk tolerance, and whether teams can run mission-critical systems without friction.

Here, T-Mobile is describing a migration effort already underway, which matters strategically. It signals that T-Mobile is not trying to preserve VMware indefinitely. Instead, it is trying to prevent a support gap from becoming a forced acceleration of a migration that is already blocked by the complexity of moving more than 1,000 applications. In cloud and virtualization transitions, the hardest problem is rarely “install the new platform.” It is inventorying what runs where, untangling dependencies, validating performance, meeting reliability requirements, and then doing it at a pace that does not break operations.

This kind of dispute also highlights why these lawsuits can become board-level issues, not just legal ones. If T-Mobile is right and Broadcom is obligated to continue supporting the perpetual licenses, then the company buys time for engineering and operations teams to finish migrations on a schedule they can manage. If T-Mobile is wrong, it could face a scenario where workloads are technically stranded on older dependencies sooner than planned. Even if the end goal remains migration off VMware, the journey matters because downtime and risk have costs.

The resolution also carries broader implications for other enterprises running VMware-based infrastructures on similar license models. If courts treat support obligations in a narrow way, customers may feel increased pressure to rush migrations or renegotiate terms, even when their application portfolios cannot be moved quickly. If courts enforce support obligations more strongly, it can reshape customer leverage and vendor expectations in future contract renewals and support transitions.

Bottom line: T-Mobile is leveraging the courts to keep VMware perpetual license support in place while it continues migrating off VMware, citing the sheer footprint of its deployments, roughly 303,140 CPU cores, and the heavy lifting of moving over 1,000 applications. For executives and boards, this is a reminder that infrastructure exits are not just engineering projects. They are contractual risk, timing risk, and continuity risk, and a single support clause can determine whether your migration plan stays controlled or becomes a scramble.