The European Commission told Amazon and Microsoft that it takes the preliminary view that their cloud arms, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act.
The wording matters more than it looks. Neither service meets the DMA’s quantitative thresholds. Brussels wants them in anyway.
That is the unusual part. The DMA was built around hard numbers, turnover, user counts, the kind of figures that decide automatically whether a company is a gatekeeper. AWS and Azure clear none of the cloud-specific bars.
The Commission has reached for the regulation’s qualitative route instead, arguing in its preliminary findings that the two services are an “important gateway” between businesses and their customers in the EU regardless of where the thresholds fall.
If the designation holds, AWS and Azure, the largest and second-largest cloud providers in the bloc, would face the DMA’s now-familiar obligations: no self-preferencing, mandated interoperability, and rules on data portability designed to make switching providers less punishing.
Lock-in and high switching costs are precisely what the Commission cites as the problem.
“In Europe, we are increasingly reliant on cloud computing services,” said Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition, naming consumers, businesses of every size, and public administrations.
The aim, she said, is “a level playing field for all cloud service providers.”
Henna Virkkunen, the executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, put the AI subtext on the record. Cloud services have become “a prerequisite for AI,” she said, with more than half of EU businesses now relying on them.
That line explains the timing. The fight is nominally about cloud infrastructure, but the prize is the layer beneath the AI boom, and Brussels has decided it does not want that layer governed by thresholds written before the boom began.
The preliminary findings follow a seven-month investigation. The Commission pointed to the two firms’ turnover, operational scale, entrenched user bases, and the weight their AI tools and partnerships carry in cloud procurement decisions.
Both companies have objected. Amazon has argued publicly that applying the DMA to cloud would, in its phrasing, regulate away European competitiveness and resilience.
Neither company has been designated yet. The preliminary view triggers a defence phase: Amazon and Microsoft can now contest the findings before the Commission issues a final decision, expected in the coming months.
A formal designation would start the clock on compliance.
For now it is a position, not a verdict. But it is the first time the EU has aimed its gatekeeper rules at cloud infrastructure, and it does so by stepping around the very thresholds the regime was built on.
Whether the qualitative route survives the companies’ lawyers is the question the next few months will answer.
