Nutanix reported robust quarterly earnings bolstered by VMware conquest-led new customer growth not seen since the last decade and plans for a lucrative AMD investment, but did continue to warn of a potential operational slow down tied to ongoing silicon supply chain constraints that have spread across the technology ecosystem.

Nutanix’s results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2026 came in ahead of expectations, which was a meaningful turnaround for the vendor following what had been an underwhelming Q1 release. This included strong year-over-year growth that Nutanix management linked to broad adoption of its software-based services.

That broad adoption included more than 1,000 new customers, which CEO Rajiv Ramaswami noted was “our strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years.” Ramaswami later noted that “most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) platform.”

Despite that solid growth, Ramaswami did note that overall VMware conquests remained paced, but that those recent deals with hyperscalers and storage vendors make VMware “migrations easier.”

“We don't think anything has changed from an opportunity perspective,” Ramaswami added. “I've always said that this is a multi-year journey, and it will continue to be a multi-year journey for us.”

However, silicon supply chain constraints could alter the route of that journey. Ramaswami has repeatedly noted that VMware migrations have typically been tied to hardware refresh cycles, and this week noted that “if a hardware refresh is needed, we do very well from a TCO benefit compared to the competition, which is why people are moving over.

“Now, if a customer decides to sweat their hardware in this environment, given pricing of new hardware, we can still enable a software migration because of the fact that now we're supporting a larger number of third-party storage and also being able to work on existing HCI hardware that runs VMware today,” Ramaswami added. “So we are offering our customers all of these options.”

Analysts have repeatedly stated that more than 100,000 VMware customers could eventually leave that vendor following pricing and contract changes implemented by new parent Broadcom.

“Nutanix continues to be a top alternative to VMware in the wake of the Broadcom acquisition,” equity research firm William Blair wrote in a note on Nutanix’s latest earnings. “Adoption remains strongest in the mid-market where migration friction is lower, but Nutanix is increasingly gaining footholds within larger enterprises, often starting with partial deployments that can expand over time.”

Silicon supply chain warning

Despite the robust quarter, Ramaswami and Nutanix CFO Rukmini Sivaraman did warn that the vendor began to see an impact from silicon shortages and resulting higher prices toward the latter half of the quarter.

Sivaraman noted “that the challenging supply environment for CPUs, memory, storage, and other components is delaying our customers’ ability to procure servers from our hardware partners in order to run our software,” with that hardware typically coming from named vendors Cisco, Dell, and Lenovo.

“We did start to see it become more pronounced to a greater extent than anticipated and expect it to continue through the rest of the fiscal year,” Sivaraman added. “Thus far, longer lead times, largely driven by lack of CPU availability, have been a significantly bigger challenge for us than pricing. Revenue in Q2 saw a headwind from these factors.”

Hardware vendors have noted this pricing challenge, though most have added that customer demand has been strong enough that most are willing to pay higher prices.

Nutanix witnessed a similar trend, with vendor management noting strong growth in order backlog.

“It's hard to be very precise and try to quantify that, but we do believe that our bookings in Q2 benefited from some orders being placed … earlier than originally expected as customers look to get ahead of server price increases or try to ensure access to servers,” Sivaraman explained.

AMD investment

Nutanix also reported that AMD was set to make a “strategic investment” in purchasing $150 million in Nutanix stock and over a multi-year period fund up to $100 million for work on new platforms set to go to market later this year.

Ramaswami explained that the development work would be a platform “that supports essentially inferencing and agentic application. … This will be a full stack platform on top of which people could run models and build these multi-agent applications, or even simpler, inferencing applications.”

This will be targeted at enterprises customers, and more specifically at those “in more regulated industries, customers who care about sovereignty, wanting to run their AI close to where their data is located,” Ramaswami added. “So it could also mean people who are running AI applications to the edge. So if you want to look at this set of customer base, what 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.”

The platform could also serve as the basis for growth in the GPU-as-a-service business.

“The go-to-market model is that we sell our software, the full stack, which is Nutanix Cloud Platform, our Kubernetes platform, and then our Nutanix AI piece that runs on top of all of that,” Ramaswami said. “The [research and development] effort is to take all of that, get it to work very nicely and optimally on AMD hardware, that's inside the servers, AMD GPU hardware, and accelerated compute hardware – and so we sell our software just like we sell today – and more of that software will land on platforms that have AMD hardware inside.”

Ramaswami later added that the AMD arrangement is similar to what Nutanix is already doing with chip heavyweight Nvidia.

“If you look at the AI ecosystem out there, it's built around Nvidia to start with, and AMD, … so for us, it's really important to make sure that we are well aligned and both sides want us to succeed,” Ramaswami said. “And this equity investment from AMD makes it very much their interest to see Nutanix succeed.”