Does VirtualBox run on Apple Silicon?

I have a new M1 MacBook Air that I would like to use for Virtual Machine development.

Can Oracle VirtualBox VMs run on this new Apple Silicon architecture?

The documentation on the VirtualBox website states:

In order to run VirtualBox on your machine, you need:

• Reasonably powerful x86 hardware. Any recent Intel or AMD processor should do.

But it's unclear if that documentation is current, or if there are any future plans to support the Apple Silicon ARM architecture. I have not been able to find a VirtualBox blog post or news update that states that M1 chips will or won't be supported.

One issue you have is that VirtualBox does not run on non Intel architectures.

From https://www.virtualbox.org/

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product

To run a virtual machine on Apple Silicon currently Parallels, UTM and Docker support Linux ARM VMs. Parallels and UTM also support other OSs that run on ARM including Windows but not macOS. (This paragraph will change over time).

VMware has now (Sept 2021) announced a preview version for ARM

The other thing to note is that if the VM you want to run is an Intel one then you need an emulator like Qemu. You probably can't just load an Intel VM to run natively as ARM so have to rebuild the VM from an ARM based install.

Docker can run Intel VMs on Apple Silicon from their blog as can UTM, both use QEMU as a part of implementing this.

UTM can run Intel Windows as UTM includes QEMU.

A locked and stickied post from a Site Moderator on the VirtualBox user support forum indicates that VirtualBox will never support Apple Silicon:

Nope, there will be no port, for the same reason that VirtualBox isn't available on an iPhone. VirtualBox is not a CPU emulator, it requires x86 CPU.

I suspect VirtualBox will be only one of many "obscure" applications that won't make it into the Apple/ARM ecosphere.

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=98742

the mod elaborates in an additional post:

I don't understand why people insist on not getting this simple fact: VirtualBox can't be ported to an ARM, because it's an x86 hypervisor, not a simulator. In VirtualBox your x86 guest code runs at near full speed directly on the host processor. A CPU simulator is an entirely different animal that runs hundreds of times slower: that's good enough for debugging but totally useless for real work.

Face facts: if you go down the Apple ARM road you leave x86 behind. Period. That doesn't mean that Parallels and VMWare won't try to sell you stuff, but they won't be running an x86 hypervisor on an ARM, nor will it be any other practical solution for running x86 apps on a Mac.