Summary
- The European Commission is reportedly preparing November DMA gatekeeper decisions covering Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, although the timing remains provisional.
- Brussels has already concluded preliminarily that both services are important gateways despite neither meeting the DMA’s normal quantitative designation thresholds.
- A final designation would pull cloud infrastructure further into EU platform regulation as switching costs and AI services deepen customer dependence on hyperscale providers.
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are moving closer to designation under Europe’s Digital Markets Act, with EU regulators reportedly preparing final decisions on the two cloud platforms for November.
Although the reported timetable remains provisional, Brussels has already gone considerably further than simply examining the market. In June, the European Commission reached the preliminary view that AWS and Azure should both be designated as gatekeepers, describing them as the largest and second-largest cloud computing services in the EU and important gateways between businesses and their customers.
Neither service meets the DMA’s normal quantitative thresholds for designation, so the Commission has instead used the legislation’s qualitative route. Its assessment points to entrenched user bases, high switching costs, broad surrounding ecosystems, long-standing market positions, and the growing importance of artificial intelligence services in cloud purchasing decisions.
When the investigations began in November 2025, Brussels also opened a wider examination of whether the DMA’s existing obligations were capable of addressing competition problems in cloud computing. That work has pushed the debate beyond market share towards the technical and commercial dependencies that make customers difficult to win or move.
Cloud lock-in moves into the DMA
Moving an enterprise workload rarely means transferring one application between interchangeable servers, because organisations can depend on provider-specific databases, identity systems, networking, monitoring, security tooling, managed services, and contractual discounts. Large data transfers can add further engineering cost and operational risk, while employees may also have to relearn operational processes built around one provider’s tools.
Artificial intelligence is adding another set of dependencies as businesses increasingly procure model access, GPU capacity, data services, development environments, agent frameworks, and security controls through the same hyperscale platforms that already host core applications. The Commission’s June assessment explicitly identified AI tools and partnerships as an increasingly important factor in cloud procurement.
A company may therefore remain technically free to migrate while facing enough integration work, staff retraining, data transfer, contract restructuring, and service replacement to make moving commercially unattractive. Those forms of lock-in are difficult to express through a simple market share figure, which helps explain why the Commission has pursued the qualitative designation route.
The DMA was initially associated most visibly with consumer-facing platforms including search, app stores, social networks, messaging, and online advertising, but cloud infrastructure sits further down the technology stack. Bringing AWS and Azure into the regime would extend gatekeeper regulation into services that businesses use to build and operate their own products.
Amazon and Microsoft are already designated as gatekeepers for other services, although AWS and Azure are not currently listed as designated core platform services. Any final cloud decisions would therefore bring new parts of both companies under the regime rather than merely extending existing compliance work.
AI makes infrastructure competition harder to separate
European organisations are reassessing cloud architecture for reasons that reach beyond competition policy, while sovereignty requirements, resilience planning, AI compute demand, data location rules, and pressure on infrastructure spending are encouraging closer examination of concentrated technology estates.
None of those pressures automatically favours smaller providers, because hyperscalers can spread infrastructure costs across enormous customer bases, maintain broad service catalogues, and invest heavily in specialised hardware and AI services. Their scale can make them more attractive precisely when organisations need capabilities that would be difficult to assemble independently.
The Commission is instead examining whether that advantage becomes self-reinforcing in ways that make it harder for customers to change provider or for competitors to reach them on workable terms. Its wider cloud investigation is considering interoperability, data access, bundling, and contractual relationships as part of that assessment.
Even a gatekeeper designation would begin another phase rather than settle Europe’s cloud competition debate, because the practical effect would depend on which obligations apply and how regulators interpret them in infrastructure markets where technical dependencies are more complicated than switching a consumer application.
Google Cloud also shows why the market cannot be reduced to a straightforward size ranking. The current qualitative designation proceedings concern AWS and Azure, while the Commission’s broader investigation is examining whether the structure of cloud computing itself exposes gaps in the existing rulebook.
The November timetable remains reported rather than confirmed, but the regulatory position has already moved substantially since the investigations began. Brussels has concluded preliminarily that cloud infrastructure can function as a gatekeeping layer even without meeting the DMA’s conventional numerical tests, while AI services are now part of the evidence supporting that view.
