The European Commission has told Amazon and Microsoft that their cloud computing arms should answer to the Digital Markets Act, a preliminary verdict announced on 25 June that could reshape how the continent’s companies buy computing power. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the two largest cloud providers operating in the European Union, were informed that regulators view them as gatekeepers, the DMA’s term for platforms that sit as an unavoidable bridge between businesses and their customers.
What makes the step notable is how the Commission arrived at it. Under the regulation’s original design, a firm is presumed to be a gatekeeper only when it clears specific quantitative thresholds on turnover and user numbers. Neither AWS nor Azure met those bars for their cloud services. Instead, regulators leaned on the two market investigations opened in November 2025 to argue that the qualitative reality, entrenched market power, punishing switching costs and deep customer lock-in, justifies designation regardless of the arithmetic. It is the first time the executive has used this route for cloud infrastructure, and it signals a willingness to stretch the law’s logic to catch conduct the numbers alone would let slip.
The reasoning matters far beyond the two named companies. Cloud has become the quiet plumbing of the modern economy: banks, hospitals, start-ups and public administrations all rent computing capacity rather than owning it. The Commission’s preliminary finding argues that once a customer commits to one provider, the cost and complexity of moving elsewhere, from data egress fees to rewritten software, make competition more theoretical than real. Add the growing entanglement of cloud with artificial intelligence, where the same firms supply the training infrastructure for the models everyone wants, and the concern about a gateway that few can bypass sharpens considerably.
Designation would not, by itself, impose penalties. Rather, it would draw AWS and Azure into the DMA’s compliance regime, the same rulebook that already binds the likes of Apple, Google and Meta. That could mean obligations to ease switching, to interoperate, and to refrain from favouring their own downstream services. If the preliminary view is confirmed, the companies would have six months to bring their designated services into line, a deadline that would land in the first half of 2027.
Both firms retain the right to reply before anything becomes final, and the wording of the announcement, preliminary throughout, leaves room for that exchange to shift the outcome. Amazon and Microsoft can be expected to contest the threshold-free logic vigorously, precisely because a favourable precedent for regulators here would make future designations easier across other infrastructure markets.
The deeper significance lies in what the case says about the DMA’s ambitions. Drafted as a tool against consumer-facing platforms, the regulation is now being tested as an instrument of oversight over the business-to-business backbone of the digital economy. Whether the courts ultimately bless the Commission’s expansive reading is an open question. But the direction of travel is clear: Europe intends to treat concentrated control of essential digital infrastructure as a matter for active supervision, not passive observation, and the cloud is the newest frontier of that resolve.
