T-Mobile Is Dragging Broadcom to Court Over VMware Support It Paid For
T-Mobile is suing Broadcom in a New York court, arguing the company was contractually obliged to keep supporting VMware perpetual licences it purchased in 2023. The case, filed in the New York Supreme Court in August 2025, was first reported by The Register.
The scale of T-Mobile's VMware footprint makes the dispute a bit more interesting than your average vendor spat. The carrier runs tens of thousands of virtual machines across roughly 303,140 CPU cores. It's actively migrating off VMware, but with over 1,000 applications to shift, that's not something you do over a long weekend.
The backstory is straightforward enough. T-Mobile bought perpetual VMware licences in 2023 with two years of support baked in and an option to purchase a third year. Then Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware and promptly axed perpetual licence sales entirely, forcing customers toward subscriptions bundled into pricier, consolidated packages.
When T-Mobile tried to exercise that third-year support option for just over $5.28 million, Broadcom refused. The reason given in an email was blunt: perpetual products were discontinued, and that included pre-agreed renewal options. T-Mobile, understandably, disagreed with that interpretation.
A judge sided with T-Mobile enough to grant an injunction, allowing it to receive support from October 2025 through August 2026 for the $5.28 million figure, plus a $500,000 undertaking. The company is now pushing for a full declaration that it was always entitled to that renewal.
At one stage, T-Mobile offered $20 million for two years of support and updates. That offer reflected a calculation: the cost of litigation and the risk of security gaps in a live mobile network tend to focus the mind.
Broadcom, for its part, claims it has racked up $24 million supporting T-Mobile across six VMware products, including three dedicated support account managers. T-Mobile pushed back on that figure, saying it doesn't actually use three of those six products and has filed all of two service cases this year.
Broadcom's legal team has also tried to frame T-Mobile as an outlier. At a hearing in October 2025, a Broadcom lawyer pointed out that thousands of customers had already migrated to subscriptions without incident. Which is technically true, though it rather glosses over the fact that most organisations lack the appetite or resources to take on a company Broadcom's size in court. The absence of lawsuits isn't necessarily evidence of satisfaction.
The situation echoes a similar dispute Broadcom had with AT&T, which was settled privately, and an ongoing case involving Tesco. Neither T-Mobile nor Broadcom has said anything publicly about the current proceedings.