The European Commission's
clearance is tied to remedies relating to Broadcom's interoperability with
rivals that would address competition concerns, the people said.
Both the EU antitrust
watchdog, which is scheduled to decide on the deal by July 17, and Broadcom
declined to comment.
Broadcom shares rose as much as 5 percent in early trade and
were up 4.9 percent at evening. VMware was up 2.7 percent.
One of the remedies focuses on Fibre Channel Host-Bus
Adapters (FC HBAs) and is targeted at rival Marvell Technology, one of the
people said. Marvell Technology did not respond to a request for comment.
FC HBAs are storage adapters that connect servers to storage
located outside the server on a storage-area network using the fiber channel
protocol, typically through a switch. Broadcom is a leading supplier of FC
HBAs.
Broadcom's other key hurdle is in Britain where the British
competition agency will next month announce its provisional findings about the
deal and possible remedies if required.
Companies have become more wary about the Competition and
Markets Authority (CMA) after it blocked Microsoft's Activision deal while the
EU cleared it.
The US Federal Trade Commission is also investigating
Broadcom's VMware acquisition.
Broadcom, which supplies chips used in data centres for
networking and specialised chips that speed up AI work, announced the deal, its
biggest, last year to diversify into enterprise software. © Reuters