Summary

• The European Commission has taken a preliminary view that AWS and Microsoft Azure should be designated as cloud gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act.
• The case moves EU platform regulation into enterprise infrastructure, where cloud choice shapes AI adoption, data strategy, software procurement, and switching costs.
• Amazon and Microsoft can respond before any final designation, but Brussels is treating cloud as a market access layer rather than a neutral utility.

The European Commission has taken a preliminary view that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, extending Europe’s platform competition regime into the cloud infrastructure market.

The Commission has informed Amazon and Microsoft that their cloud computing services appear to act as important gateways between businesses and customers in the EU. AWS and Azure are the largest and second largest cloud services in the bloc, and Brussels says both appear to benefit from entrenched user bases, high switching costs, lock-in effects, and wider technology ecosystems.

Amazon and Microsoft can respond before any final decision is made, but the preliminary assessment marks a sharp expansion of how EU digital competition policy is being applied. Cloud services are no longer being treated only as back-end infrastructure. They are becoming regulatory targets because they sit beneath enterprise software, AI development, data platforms, public services, and many of the systems that companies use to modernise operations.

The Commission’s DMA update on cloud services places artificial intelligence directly inside that assessment. It says both providers’ AI tools and partnerships have become a decisive factor in cloud procurement, meaning cloud lock-in is now connected to model access, developer tooling, data pipelines, productivity software, and the infrastructure needed to run AI systems in production.

That changes the practical meaning of cloud competition. Switching provider is not like replacing a consumer app or renegotiating a commodity service. A large business, bank, public authority, manufacturer, or healthcare organisation may have years of architecture, security controls, data flows, identity systems, procurement decisions, and software dependencies tied to a particular cloud estate. Moving critical workloads can introduce operational risk, compliance exposure, engineering cost, and disruption to services that customers and citizens rely on.

Where AI systems are added to that estate, the decision becomes stickier. Organisations building copilots, internal automation, analytics platforms, model training environments, or customer-facing AI services may use proprietary tools that sit naturally inside one cloud ecosystem. That can make technical and commercial sense in the short term, especially when teams are under pressure to move quickly, but it can also narrow future choices if data, models, and integration layers become difficult to move.

A final gatekeeper designation would not force AWS or Azure out of the European market. It would increase regulatory pressure around how they treat business users, rivals, and adjacent services. The likely areas of scrutiny include interoperability, data portability, self-preferencing, contractual restrictions, bundling, transparency, and the practical ability of customers to build multi-cloud or hybrid architectures without being penalised by cost or complexity.

European cloud providers have long argued that hyperscaler dominance weakens competition, reduces customer leverage, and leaves the region dependent on non-European infrastructure. The Commission’s preliminary view gives that argument more force, although it does not remove the commercial reality that AWS and Azure provide capabilities, scale, reliability, and global reach that many European customers need.

The case also sits alongside Europe’s wider technology sovereignty push. Brussels is trying to strengthen regional capacity in cloud, chips, AI, datacentres, open source, and digital public infrastructure, while still depending heavily on US cloud platforms. Competition enforcement gives the EU a more immediate instrument than industrial policy alone. Instead of waiting for European alternatives to reach hyperscale, it can place obligations on dominant providers that already shape the market.

For enterprise buyers, the case should sharpen procurement questions that often get postponed. Cloud architecture now determines future AI flexibility, data control, resilience, supplier concentration, and bargaining power. European regulators are signalling that those questions belong in competition policy, not only inside IT departments.