The EU is about to declare AWS and Azure gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act

The European Commission is set to unveil preliminary findings as early as next week stating that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure appear to meet the requirements to be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, Bloomberg reported. A final decision is expected by the end of 2026, though timelines could shift.

If designated, AWS and Azure would face a range of obligations including interoperability requirements, curbs on customer lock-in, and restrictions on self-preferencing. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 10% of global turnover, rising to 20% for repeated breaches.

The Commission began a formal market investigation in November after concluding that Microsoft and Amazon “occupy very strong positions” in the cloud market. The investigation followed several major outages that highlighted the risks of concentrating critical infrastructure in a handful of providers. An AWS outage lasting 15 hours disrupted operations at Apple, McDonald’s, and Epic Games. Azure troubles prevented Alaska Airlines check-ins and halted votes in the Scottish Parliament.

The DMA already applies to six designated gatekeepers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. But those designations covered specific services like app stores and messaging, not cloud infrastructure. The DMA has been criticised for moving slowly against the specific services it was designed to regulate. Extending it to cloud would represent a significant expansion of the law’s reach.

The timing is politically charged. The DMA has drawn the ire of the Trump administration, which has framed EU tech regulation as attacks on American companies. Apple and Meta have already been fined EUR 500 million and EUR 200 million respectively for breaches. Adding cloud to the scope would put the EU on a direct collision course with Washington’s two largest cloud providers at a moment when trade talks are already strained.

For European businesses, the practical implications are substantial. Cloud lock-in, where switching providers requires expensive and time-consuming migration, is one of the most common complaints about AWS and Azure. Europe’s cloud dependency is not just a technical issue but a political one, as TNW has reported. US hyperscalers control roughly 70% of European cloud infrastructure revenue. Interoperability requirements could lower the barriers to moving workloads to European providers like OVHcloud, Hetzner, and Scaleway.

Microsoft and AWS declined to comment or did not respond. The Commission has not confirmed the timeline. But if the preliminary findings land next week, the cloud market’s two dominant players will spend the rest of 2026 negotiating the terms of their European operations under the most consequential tech regulation in the world.