EU moves to designate Amazon, Microsoft cloud as gatekeepers

The European Commission told Amazon and Microsoft on June 25 that AWS and Azure should be designated gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, bringing cloud infrastructure into the bloc’s flagship competition regime. The move would subject the two biggest cloud providers in Europe to strict obligations aimed at curbing market power across the digital economy.

If the designation is finalized, the companies would face limits on self-preferencing and new duties on interoperability and data portability. Those rules matter most to businesses that need to move workloads, applications and data between providers without being trapped by technical barriers, contractual pressure or the cost of rebuilding systems from scratch. The Commission said its preliminary view covered Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure specifically for cloud computing services.

Brussels opened the cloud investigations on November 18, 2025, and said they would examine obstacles to interoperability between cloud services, limited or conditioned access to business-user data, tying and bundling, and potentially imbalanced contractual terms. The Commission said it aimed to finish the Amazon and Microsoft cases within 12 months. In its preliminary assessment, it said AWS and Azure are the largest and second-largest cloud computing services in the European Union, and that both appear to benefit from entrenched user bases, lock-in effects and high switching costs. It also said artificial intelligence was sharply increasing demand for cloud services and that AWS and Azure appeared to keep a large share of that demand inside their own ecosystems.

The cloud push widens the EU’s competition playbook beyond app stores, search and social media, where the DMA has already been used to restrain the largest digital platforms. It also underlines how central cloud infrastructure has become to modern computing and AI development, especially for large enterprises, government contractors and software companies that rely on a handful of dominant providers.

The stakes are high. The DMA allows fines of up to 10% of worldwide turnover for noncompliance and up to 20% for repeated infringements. The Commission’s 2025 DMA implementation report, published on May 22, 2026, said the cloud investigations were still ongoing, and it also opened a third investigation into whether the DMA can effectively tackle competitiveness and fairness problems in the cloud sector. For U.S. customers and corporate IT buyers, the practical test will be whether the new rules make it easier to move data and applications between providers, or whether the market remains shaped by the same technical and commercial ties that have kept AWS and Azure at the center of global cloud spending.