We're halfway through the decade, and cloud saw a new narrative emerge in 2025. With outages knocking out half the web, and data sovereignty becoming a hot button issue, it seemed like users began to question the very U.S.-based foundations they had been relying on for so long.

In a similar sort of way, the Broadcom pivot of VMware to cloud amplified users' voices in protest against the vendor lock-in nature of U.S. giants.

In some ways, this clamor drowned out the narrative that Big Tech wanted to push in 2025: AI, AI, AI. That thread was so strong, it even saw Oracle shed a long-term and popular CEO synonymous with its cloud credentials to reassure stakeholders it was all in on artificial intelligence.

But as the top five cloud stories of SDxCentral demonstrate, people are more interested in the twists and turns within Big Tech's corridors than any bandwagons and marketing spiel. And that's how it should always be, we feel.

Broadcom, VMware, ad infinitum

The year in cloud was defined not by the hyperscalers, but the perhaps less fashionable world of virtual machines (VMs).

Of course we're talking about VMware, whose acquisition and ongoing integration by Broadcom filled out digital column inches on SDxCentral and elsewhere throughout 2025.

Where to start? Let's start with what you probably already know: chip giant Broadcom is pivoting VMware to a new licensing model, and some customers aren't happy.

In July, it was reported some perpetual VMware license holders were unable to download crucial software patches, with some still waiting for months after contacting Broadcom for customer support.

Then there were the reported price hikes, with civil engineering firm Kimley-Horn telling us they ditched their long-standing work with VMware following licensing and pricing changes Broadcom instituted for VMware’s Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) service.

July saw former VMware customers receive audit letters from Broadcom, following through on cease-and-desist letters it sent earlier this year.

The drama extended to partners, too, with VMware ending its channel program in place of an invite-only system, alongside shuttering its smaller cloud service provider-focused White Label model.

One perennial thorn in Broadcom's side was the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) group, which called out Broadcom over its controversial licensing changes, and then criticized the European Union (EU) over how long it took the union to green-light Broadcom’s problematic acquisition of VMware – 672 days, a passage of time that saw the U.S. giant annoy a major Dutch water ministry with legal fallout to boot.

Another bunch of thorns were rivals who smelled blood and set out their stalls to lure in disgruntled VMwarers. Caylent, OVHcloud, Platform9, and Nutanix all offered exit options for existing VMware customers, while Gartner warned that VMware will lose 35% of workloads by 2028, as hyperscalers such as Google Cloud and Microsoft prove an attractive proposition for current customers.

Still, it wasn't totally bad news for VMware's new owners; our executive editor Dan Meyer called them one of 2025's winners, so there's that.

Read the full story:

How one company left VMware over Broadcom license changes

Read more:

Has Broadcom’s VMware acquisition come back to bite?

'S' is for sovereignty

Think of cloud in 2025, and you'll think of all things data and digital sovereignty.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Europe is leading the way here, although whether it's with much success is debatable.

In July, Microsoft's legal director for France fessed up that the cloud provider cannot guarantee that French user data won't be transmitted to the United States under government orders.

Whether Europe can stand on its own without the U.S. hyperscalers was also called into question, with the Open Cloud Coalition (OCC) suggesting that failure to resolve the continent’s lack of competition in the market would see local governments lose out on $522 billion in productivity and fiscal savings by 2030.

Switzerland went less than neutral by restricting the use of international cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google, amid privacy concerns.

AI also has a part to play in this, naturally, what with a greater demand for data to fuel all those AI models. Accordingly, Microsoft revealed toward the end of the year that data processed by its AI services will remain within the EU. All customer data, whether at rest or in transit, will be stored and processed exclusively in the EU, unless a customer requests otherwise.

An AI-focused panel at this year's DCD Compute event saw Juniper Networks pour water on Europe's sovereignty ambitions, suggesting the continent was ultimately naive to think it could escape the shadow of either U.S. giants or the Asian stalwarts who supply its chips.

Read the full story:
The real AI bubble? Network underfunding and EU naivety

Hyper outages

October was a spooky month for outages.

AWS infamously suffered a major outage, which saw 16 million user outage reports from across more than 60 countries.

Microsoft, meanwhile, saw a DNS issue knock out Azure – just like AWS – affecting 18,000 users at its peak, according to Downdetector.

Both hyperscalers fell under scrutiny by the EU as the body launched an investigation in November under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), looking to determine if they should face new regulations, such as increased interoperability with rival could software, better data portability for users, and restrictions on tying and bundling apps and services.

The European Commission will also asses whether AWS and Microsoft “should be designated as gatekeepers for their cloud computing services,” despite “not meeting the DMA gatekeeper thresholds for size, user number, and market position.”

The cloud giants have so far avoided DMA regulation because a large share of their business comes from enterprise contracts, making it difficult to determine the number of individual users in Europe – a key benchmark used to consider big tech services for extra oversight.

The investigation will also assess if the DMA can effectively tackle practices that may limit competitiveness and fairness in the EU’s cloud computing sector.

Some would argue the scrutiny is overdue, and October saw SDxCentral investigate whether it was time for telecom-style regulation on the Big Clouds.

According to recent Strand Consult research, the likes of AWS escape the kinds of statutory obligations telecom operators have, such as universal service contributions, minimum backup and reliability rules, and public filing of tariffs. While telecom operators face extensive regulation on reliability and public-interest duties, cloud vendors operate with far less mandatory accountability.

Time will tell if 2026 brings any change to the cloud status quo, but it's unlikely anything will be done before the next major outage breaks half the internet again in both Europe and around the globe.

Read the full story:

AWS and Azure fall under EU scrutiny as Google Cloud let off the hook

Read more:

AWS, Azure outages demand telecom-style regulation on Big Clouds

Oracle leadership refresh

After 11 years, Safra Catz left her CEO role at Oracle, replaced by new co-CEOs Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia.

This was quite a surprise for the so-called fourth hyperscaler as Catz had been leading Oracle to some pretty dizzying heights with very little cause for concern from pundits.

In the world of enterprise tech and cloud, that’s a rarity. For comparison, look at the constant chatter over German giant SAP as it tries to convince its on-premises ERP customers to head to its cloud products with varying degrees of success.

Oracle's leadership change was said to help the vendor pivot further into the AI age. The next 12 months will reveal how that plan goes – Big Red's share price plummeted 10 percent after its latest quarterly revenue fell short of expectations.

Read the full story:

Oracle changes CEOs for some network pedigree, but its AI ambitions remain cloudy

Nvidia (again)

Tech journalists aren't contractually obliged to mention Nvidia in everything they write these days, and in a cloud context, there have been rumors Nvidia is paring back its ambitions for its DGX Cloud platform.

But it's still worth a quick mention that all the hyperscalers, including Oracle, were revealed to be making use of Nvidia Dynamo, the chip giant's software platform designed to drive more efficiency for AI inference workloads across disparate GPUs.

Nvidia revealed that AWS is using Dynamo to accelerate inference for customers running generative AI workloads.

Google Cloud, meanwhile, is employing Dynamo to optimize large language model (LLM) inference on its cloud-based AI Hypercomputer supercomputer platform.

Over at Microsoft, Azure is tapping the offering to power multinode LLM inference on its GB200-v6, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is utilizing Dynamo to support multinode LLM inferencing on its Superclusters.

The AI inference use case is already redefining cloud use and will continue to grow next year in leaps and bounds: watch out for an upcoming feature on SDxCentral featuring the hyperscaler view as well as those of the neoclouds and open-source vendors.

Read the full story:

Big four cloud giants tap Nvidia Dynamo to boost AI inference