VMware has quietly walked back its SmartNIC ambitions
Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Back when it was an independent company, VMware guessed that its customers would also appreciate borrowing from hyperscalers’ approach to hardware and therefore adapted its hypervisor to run on the SmartNICs so they could host network functions.
- ▪Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor.
- ▪Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers.
- ▪Back when it was an independent company, VMware guessed that its customers would also appreciate borrowing from hyperscalers’ approach to hardware and therefore adapted its hypervisor to run on the SmartNICs so they could host network funct
The Register publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 634 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/21/vmware-has-quietly-walked-back-its-smartnic-ambitions/5297654 |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:02:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T08:08:47.622Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T08:08:47.622Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 0o8wT2oxF9JV · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); virtualization VMware has quietly walked back its SmartNIC ambitions exclusive Virtzilla’s bet on hyperscale hardware going mainstream didn’t excite customers, but may live on Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor Published mon 21 Sep 2026 // 08:02 UTC READ MORE Your cloud survived everything except the real world now Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on 1 hour ago Failed networking vendor Cambium set to turn off its cloudy management…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Register
