The UK CMA provisionally clears Broadcom's $61B VMware acquisition, after finding that the deal “would not harm competition”; the deal still needs US approval
Katharine Gemmell / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a nine-month UK arc that began when the CMA first flagged the deal for investigation in November 2022 and escalated in March 2023, when it warned the acquisition could make servers more expensive and launched an in-depth Phase 2 probe after Broadcom failed to address its concerns within five working days.
The provisional clearance lands a week after the EU approved the same $61B deal conditional on access and interoperability commitments, leaving US approval as the last outstanding gate — and it echoes the CMA's later no-concerns clearance of HPE's $14B Juniper Networks purchase.
First-order effects
- Broadcom and VMware clear their largest regulatory hurdle outside the US, moving the deal one step from closing with only American approval pending.
- The CMA drops its March warning that the deal could raise server prices, finding instead that the combination would not harm competition — no UK-specific remedies are being demanded at this stage.
Second-order effects
- Broadcom now faces divergent conditions across jurisdictions: binding access and interoperability commitments in the EU versus a clean UK bill of health, shaping how it can reprice VMware licensing post-close.
- Enterprise server and virtualization customers who supplied the CMA's pricing concerns lose their strongest regulatory lever once the US approves, shifting their recourse to contractual terms rather than antitrust intervention.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — EU conditional approvals plus CMA provisional clearances for Broadcom-VMware and later HPE-Juniper — large infrastructure consolidation deals are learning to survive multi-jurisdiction review by conceding behavioral commitments where required rather than abandoning transactions.
- Regulators' reliance on interoperability and access remedies rather than structural blocks points toward a regime where dominant software platforms can consolidate as long as rivals retain technical pathways in.
The trend: Global antitrust authorities are sequentially clearing large semiconductor-and-infrastructure acquisitions through behavioral commitments rather than blocking them, with each regional approval pressuring the remaining jurisdictions toward convergence.