Broadcom Report: 56% of Enterprises Move AI Inference to Private Cloud

Broadcom's Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report marks a definitive end to the AI experimentation era in enterprise. It shows that 56% of enterprises are already running or planning to run production AI inferencing on private cloud environments. This represents a 15-percentage-point drop in public cloud usage for similar workloads, now at 41%. The shift is driven by three factors: cost (long-term expenses favor owned infrastructure), complexity (private clouds offer tighter integrations and less data egress charges), and control (data governance and compliance requirements).

For tech professionals, this means rethinking deployment strategies. Private cloud solutions from VMware (Broadcom-owned) and others are becoming the default for inference workloads, which are more predictable and latency-sensitive than training. The report also suggests that hybrid approaches remain relevant but that pure public cloud is losing its dominance for AI production. As inference scales, enterprises will invest more in on-premise or co-located hardware, potentially reshaping the cloud vendor landscape and pushing providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP to offer more hybrid or private options.