Broadcom Inc. is transforming its VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 software into an artificial intelligence-native platform, giving developers a secure, modern and private cloud infrastructure that’s geared for the development of sophisticated AI applications and agents. The addition of VMware Private AI Services means VCF 9.0 can now be used as a platform for Private AI, where developers can find everything they need to get started building, and later deploy AI models and AI agents. VMware Private AI Services will launch early next year and span everything from fine-tuning to inference, with capabilities such as graphics processing unit monitoring, an AI model store, a model runtime, agent builder, vector database and data indexing and retrieval services, all available as part of the broader VCF 9.0 subscription. Developers will also be aided by a generative AI assistant called VCF Intelligent Assist, available in preview now, to help diagnose and resolve infrastructure problems. VCF 9.0 also gets support for the Model Context Protocol, enabling AI agents to tap into external data sources and tools and use them to collaborate with other agents, as well as a multi-accelerator model runtime that supports the flexible deployment of AI models on GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Nvidia Corp. In addition, customers will get access to multi-tenant models-as-a-service, which helps to lower costs by securely sharing AI models across tenants or separate lines of business. Broadcom said it wants developers to embrace VCF 9.0 as a single, unified platform for both AI and non-AI workloads, and to that end it has also announced a host of new updates that aim to speed up infrastructure delivery. For instance, VMware vSAN, a software-defined storage solution that combines local storage from multiple servers into a single shared storage pool, now gets native support for Amazon S3 compatible object storage interfaces. This, it said, will enable unstructured data to be stored on vSAN directly without any proprietary hardware or third-party licensing, so organizations can create unified storage policies for block, file and object storage and reduce storage infrastructure complexity. VCF 9.0 is also integrating with GitOps, Argo CD and Istio to secure application delivery, using Git as a source of truth for Kubernetes. It means developers will be able to store both their infrastructure and apps as code in Git, and use Argo CD to automate consistent deployments. Meanwhile, the Istio Service Mesh provides zero-trust networking, traffic control and observability for containers, which host the components of applications.