The European Commission's preliminary decision to designate AWS and Azure as DMA gatekeepers is the most consequential cloud regulation in a decade — and it didn't happen because of market share. It happened because of AI.
For years, the EU's Digital Markets Act was understood as a law for consumer-facing platforms — app stores, search engines, social networks. The rules targeting gatekeepers were written with smartphones and operating systems in mind.
On June 25, 2026, the European Commission extended that framework to cloud infrastructure. It informed Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure that they are, in the Commission's preliminary view, gatekeepers under the DMA — the first time that designation has been applied to cloud computing in EU history.
The cloud market is not the same after this week. The question is not whether the designation matters. It is how much.
The Commission launched market investigations into cloud computing in November 2025. The preliminary conclusions arrived in June 2026 — seven months later, faster than typical DMA investigations.
The speed reflects urgency, and the Commission made its rationale explicit: AI tools have become a "decisive factor" in cloud procurement decisions, according to its published findings. When enterprises evaluate which cloud platform to standardize on, integrated AI services — SageMaker for AWS, Azure OpenAI Service for Microsoft — are increasingly the differentiating factor. Choosing a cloud provider now often means choosing an AI ecosystem.
The Commission's concern is that AWS and Azure are using their existing cloud dominance to funnel the growing demand for AI services into their own proprietary systems. An enterprise that has already committed significant workloads to AWS faces real costs to access Google Cloud's AI offerings rather than simply using SageMaker. That friction — technical, contractual, and operational — is not a neutral market outcome. The Commission assessed it as structural leverage.
This is the technically important part, and it changes how the DMA should be understood going forward.
AWS and Azure do not meet the DMA's standard quantitative thresholds for gatekeeper designation. Those thresholds are based on user counts and turnover figures that were calibrated for consumer platforms. Cloud computing infrastructure, sold primarily to businesses, generates the revenue required but does not accumulate consumer user accounts in the same way.
The Commission instead applied a qualitative assessment — designating AWS and Azure based on their "entrenched and durable" market positions and their role as "important gateways" between businesses and their end customers. The legal basis for this qualitative route exists within the DMA's text, but this is its first significant application to infrastructure-layer technology.
AWS holds approximately 31% of the global cloud market. Azure holds approximately 23–25%. Together they represent more than half of global cloud infrastructure spend, according to multiple industry analyses. The Commission's view is that this concentration, combined with the high switching costs it documented, constitutes a structural gateway position regardless of whether it meets the numeric user thresholds.
[OPINION] The qualitative designation path is significant beyond this specific case. It means the Commission is not bound by the original numeric calibration of the DMA when it determines that infrastructure-layer markets warrant the same oversight as consumer-facing platforms. That expansion of interpretive scope is a precedent with implications far beyond cloud computing.
If the designation is finalized — which would follow a response period for both companies and a final Commission decision expected in late 2026 — AWS and Azure would have six months to reach compliance with DMA obligations. Three obligations are central to the cloud context.
Interoperability. Gatekeepers are required to ensure their services can interact effectively with other platforms and services. In the cloud context, this means AWS and Azure cannot design their APIs, data formats, or service architectures in ways that create unnecessary technical barriers to connecting with or migrating to other platforms. The Commission's published findings specifically identified current interoperability gaps as facilitating lock-in.
Data portability. Enterprise customers must be able to move their data and workloads between cloud providers without disproportionate cost or technical friction. This addresses egress fees — the charges cloud providers impose when data leaves their network — which the Commission identified as a specific mechanism that raises the cost of multi-cloud and cloud-switching strategies. The EU Data Act, which became fully applicable in September 2025, already addressed some cloud-switching obligations; DMA gatekeeper status adds enforcement teeth to that framework for AWS and Azure specifically.
No self-preferencing. AWS and Azure would be prohibited from using their cloud platforms to unfairly favor their own integrated AI tools or proprietary services over third-party alternatives. In practice, this means they cannot give SageMaker or Azure OpenAI Service preferential placement, pricing, or performance access within their own infrastructure relative to competitors' tools running on the same platforms.
The Commission's preliminary findings name AWS and Azure. Google Cloud is not included — at least not yet.
Google Cloud holds approximately 11–13% of global cloud market share, materially lower than AWS or Azure. That gap is one reason the Commission's market investigation focused on the top two providers. But Google Cloud has been the fastest-growing of the three major platforms, particularly in AI and Kubernetes-heavy workloads, and some industry advocates have argued that excluding it creates an asymmetric compliance burden.
Microsoft has made this argument publicly. In its response to the Commission's preliminary findings, Microsoft suggested that the focus on AWS and Azure ignores Google Cloud's growing market power, according to reporting by euractiv.com. This is a reasonable structural argument: a regulatory framework that applies DMA obligations to two of the three major cloud providers but not the third may redirect certain workloads toward the unregulated platform, which is not the Commission's intended outcome.
[UNCERTAIN] Whether the Commission expands the investigation to include Google Cloud — either in the current proceeding or a subsequent one — remains open. The qualitative designation path it has established means it has the legal mechanism to do so even if Google Cloud does not meet standard quantitative thresholds.
Both companies have pushed back, on predictably different grounds.
Amazon has argued that gatekeeper designation could deter cloud infrastructure investment in Europe. The EU cloud market has been a significant capital allocation target for all three hyperscalers — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have each announced substantial European data center investments in 2025 and 2026. The implicit argument is that compliance costs and regulatory friction would make European market expansion less attractive relative to North American or Asian investment alternatives.
Microsoft's response has been more focused on competitive framing — pointing to Google Cloud as an omission — rather than disputing the fundamental premise of the Commission's analysis. That distinction is meaningful: a company that disputes the premise fights the designation on legal grounds; a company that disputes the scope is implicitly accepting that some regulatory framework is coming.
[OPINION] Neither pushback is likely to materially alter the trajectory. The Commission has invested significant political capital in extending the DMA's reach to cloud infrastructure, and the qualitative designation path was clearly chosen precisely because the standard quantitative thresholds would not have captured AWS or Azure. The legal challenge for both companies is that the Commission built its case around a framework they cannot rebut by simply showing their user numbers.
For enterprise technology teams, the practical implications of a finalized designation are substantial — but the timeline is important.
A final decision is expected in late 2026. If confirmed, the six-month compliance window puts significant operational changes into late 2027 at the earliest. Enterprises procuring cloud infrastructure today are not operating under DMA gatekeeper rules yet.
What the preliminary designation does change is the negotiating posture of enterprise buyers today. The Commission's public finding that high switching costs and egress fees are market distortions gives enterprise procurement teams a documented regulatory basis to push back on these practices in commercial negotiations, even before formal compliance obligations apply.
The interoperability obligation, if finalized, will likely accelerate the adoption of open standards for cloud-to-cloud data transfer. AWS and Azure will be required — not merely encouraged — to support workload portability in ways that make multi-cloud architectures less operationally expensive. Smaller cloud providers and regional EU cloud operators (OVHcloud, Hetzner, Deutsche Telekom's Open Telekom Cloud) will be the primary beneficiaries of any genuine reduction in lock-in practices.
The following represents the author's analysis and should not be taken as financial or investment advice.
The DMA's extension to cloud infrastructure is the correct regulatory move, even if its implementation will be contested and messy.
[OPINION] The EU Commission identified the right structural problem: AI integration has transformed cloud procurement into a multi-year platform decision with very high switching costs, and the two largest providers have used that dynamic to deepen lock-in in ways that reduce competitive pressure on both pricing and feature development. That is a textbook case for gatekeeper intervention.
The harder question is whether the DMA's obligations — written for consumer-facing platforms — are the right tool for cloud infrastructure. Interoperability mandates and data portability requirements are meaningful for consumer services. For enterprise cloud environments, where workloads involve complex dependencies across dozens of managed services, compute clusters, and proprietary AI tooling, the technical definition of "interoperability" is genuinely difficult.
[OPINION] The six-month compliance window that would follow a final designation is not long enough to implement meaningful changes to API architecture, egress fee structures, and self-preferencing practices simultaneously. The Commission should expect compliance that is technically formal rather than substantively transformative in the first round.
The Google Cloud omission is also a real problem. Asymmetric compliance burdens in a three-player market create distortions that the regulation is supposed to prevent. If the Commission does not expand its investigation to include Google Cloud before the final decision on AWS and Azure, it will have created a structural incentive to route certain European workloads to the unregulated third platform. That is not a competitive outcome.
The precedent, regardless of those implementation concerns, matters. Cloud infrastructure is now within the DMA's scope. The Commission has established that AI-driven market power at the infrastructure layer triggers gatekeeper obligations. Every major cloud provider operating in Europe should be building for that compliance reality, not betting against the designation.
The European Commission's preliminary designation of AWS and Azure as DMA gatekeepers is the first time cloud infrastructure has been brought under the DMA's competitive framework. It happened because AI changed the stakes: integrated AI services transformed cloud procurement into a platform lock-in decision, and the Commission identified that as a structural competitive problem requiring gatekeeper-level oversight.
The final decision is expected in late 2026, with a six-month compliance window following. The road between here and actual compliance obligations is long, contested, and technically complex.
But the direction is clear. Cloud infrastructure — the compute, storage, and AI services that run modern enterprise software — is now subject to the same gatekeeper framework that restructured app stores and search. The companies building cloud strategy today should be building it for a world where portability, interoperability, and non-preferencing are regulatory requirements, not aspirational best practices.
