Every week, our editorial team chooses its favorite stories to feature here. However, this week VMware Explore dominated the news, so we decided to do a roundup of the event with our analysis.

From even before the event started, with executive editor Dan Meyer's prediction of Broadcom's influence on the event, to his wrap-up at the end with analysts speculating what next year's event will look like (if there even is one). In between, there was cloud, multi-cloud, artificial intelligence, a love triangle and AMD's supercharged DPUs.

As our lead reporter for the event, Emma Chervek summarized what she saw: "At VMware Explore 2023, the vendor’s fast-approaching acquisition by Broadcom remained a peak interest for attendees, especially considering VMware’s new private AI partnership with rival chipmaker Nvidia and both Broadcom and VMware’s acquisition histories.

"VMware executives, however, praised the company’s open ecosystem and claimed they will be able to continue operating on their independent business plan after the deal closes — only time will tell."

Here's our complete coverage, in chronological order.

Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware has gained significant regulatory momentum over the past several months that could see the deal close by the end of October. But questions remain over how Broadcom will drive a return out of a business that it readily admits is losing market share to public cloud hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

AMD is showing how its $1.9 billion bet on data processing unit (DPU) vendor Pensando has paid off at VMware Explore, including through the chipmaker’s VMware Architecture Migration Tool (VAMT).

VMware updated its cloud orchestration capabilities that power its edge compute stack and secure access service edge (SASE) products, and also rolled out its own managed private 5G network platform. The vendor said these new services are tied to its expanded work with the software-defined edge.

The opportunities and benefits of the cloud are well-proven. Still, the majority of modern enterprises use several clouds — whether private, public, partner or sovereign — thus hampering visibility while also increasing vulnerability to increasingly expensive, reputation-harming cyberattacks.

VMware combined pieces of its Tanzu and Aria cloud-native application delivery portfolios in a move to “drive software agility” and “think about the problem differently,” Purnima Padmanabhan, VMware modern apps and management leader, told a group of reporters ahead of VMware Explore 2023.

Nvidia announced OEMS like Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo are building artificial intelligence (AI)-optimized servers that support the new VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia. This move is aimed at helping enterprises customize and optimize deployment of generative AI applications based on their unique data.

During an executive Q&A session at VMware Explore 2023, CEO Raghu Raghuram explained the private AI platform released earlier this week is essentially a software stack running on hardware that contains Nvidia components along with CPUs, storage and other components that make up standard data center offerings. VMware’s OEM partners, which initially include Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell Technologies and Lenovo, will package the full solution together.

Recent generative AI offerings allow organizations to make predictions based on data and generate new text, images or audio. But real-world biases reflected in the data used to train AI models can lead to the reproduction of those biases, New York University Professor Meredith Broussard pointed out during a VMware Explore 2023 panel discussion on responsible AI.

As expected, Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware cast a large shadow over the latter’s Explore event this week, with many still questioning what VMware might look like if the event has a 2024 edition.