A long-standing assumption in enterprise IT is starting to crack. Buying and owning physical servers has traditionally made financial sense when workloads run predictably and consistently. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami is now saying that equation has shifted, at least for the moment.
Speaking to The Register, Ramaswami noted that hyperscale cloud providers can currently beat on-premises infrastructure on both price and availability for bare metal servers. The reason comes down to purchasing power. Large cloud operators buy memory, SSDs, and server hardware in volumes that individual enterprises simply cannot match. With server DRAM and solid-state storage prices expected to stay elevated well into next year, that gap is widening rather than closing.
For CIOs trying to plan infrastructure budgets, the timing is uncomfortable. Hardware costs are harder to predict, lead times remain stretched, and the traditional argument for owning equipment outright rests on cost stability that no longer holds as firmly as it once did.
That said, Ramaswami also pointed to a countercurrent worth noting. On AI infrastructure specifically, Nutanix sees customers gravitating toward on-premises deployments rather than cloud. The reason, in this case, is also about cost, though from a different angle. When the return on investment for AI remains genuinely unclear, organizations tend to prefer infrastructure they control and can account for directly. Cloud costs for AI workloads can scale unpredictably, and many enterprises are not yet convinced the output justifies that exposure.
The most common AI use cases Ramaswami described are document search and summarization. Practical, measurable, and far from the more ambitious applications that dominate industry conversation.
Nutanix’s own results offer some context for where the broader market is moving. Third-quarter revenue reached $703 million, up 10% year over year, with annual recurring revenue growing 15% to $2.43 billion. The company added 730 new customers during the period, a figure that observers widely read as enterprises migrating away from VMware following Broadcom’s acquisition and subsequent pricing changes.
Nutanix also closed several seven-figure deals with customers who kept their existing Dell and Pure Storage hardware in place, suggesting that flexibility around external storage is removing friction from decisions that previously stalled.
For enterprises weighing their next infrastructure cycle, the honest answer is that neither cloud nor on-premises holds a clean cost advantage right now across every workload type.
