When Broadcom announced it was spending an eye-popping $61 billion for VMware in May, it seemed only a matter of time before the deal caught the attention of regulators, especially in Europe and the U.K. And sure enough, this week the EU announced that it was officially investigating the deal. In an official statement, EU's executive VP in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, expressed concern that the deal would have an adverse impact on competition: "Broadcom, a major supplier of hardware components, is acquiring VMware, a key server virtualization software provider. Our initial investigation has shown that it is essential for hardware components in servers to interoperate with VMware's software. We are concerned that after the merger, Broadcom could prevent its hardware rivals to interoperate with VMware's server virtualization software.