Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS potentially designated as gatekeepers under European DMA

The European Commission intends to designate Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This was reported by financial news agency Bloomberg. The formal announcement is expected next week, after which a final decision is anticipated by the end of 2026.

Notably, neither cloud service automatically meets the DMA's quantitative thresholds. The Commission has nonetheless chosen to proceed with designation, on the grounds that the cloud market creates forms of dependency that the original threshold criteria do not fully capture. In November 2025, the Commission already opened three market investigations into cloud computing services under the DMA, including dedicated proceedings for AWS and Azure.

If the designation is confirmed, both companies will be subject to obligations relating to interoperability, the prevention of customer lock-in, and restrictions on self-preferencing. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 10 percent of global annual turnover, rising to 20 percent for repeat infringements.

Designation despite falling short of thresholds

The DMA uses quantitative thresholds to determine whether a platform qualifies as a gatekeeper. These are based on revenue, market capitalisation and the number of active users within the EU. AWS and Azure formally do not meet that bar for their cloud infrastructure services.

Nevertheless, the Commission concludes that both companies hold very strong positions in the European cloud market. Businesses, governments and other organisations build infrastructure that is difficult to migrate to another provider, a phenomenon commonly referred to as vendor lock-in. The Commission argues that this type of market power is insufficiently captured by the existing threshold calculations.

The decision to launch an investigation, even without automatic qualification, was partly prompted by a series of major outages that highlighted the risks of concentration among a handful of providers. An AWS outage of approximately fifteen hours affected Apple, McDonald's and Epic Games, among others. Problems at Azure disrupted check-ins at Alaska Airlines and voting in the Scottish Parliament.

What gatekeeper status means in practice

When a service is officially designated as a gatekeeper under the DMA, specific behavioural obligations apply. For cloud infrastructure, this would include, among other things:

• Interoperability: customers must be able to transfer data and workloads to other cloud providers more easily.
• No self-preferencing: the gatekeeper may not structurally favour its own services over competing offerings on the same platform.
• Transparency on pricing and contracts: so that business users can make better-informed choices.

For startups and scale-ups that rely heavily on AWS or Azure, these are relevant developments. Greater portability and openness could, in theory, lower switching costs and strengthen their negotiating position vis-à-vis major cloud providers.

DMA already in force for other services of the same companies

The DMA currently applies to six designated gatekeepers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. Those designations cover specific services, however, such as app stores, search engines and messaging services. Cloud infrastructure has until now fallen outside their scope.

A potential designation of AWS and Azure would therefore represent an extension of the existing DMA framework, not a new application of it to new players. Amazon and Microsoft as companies are already familiar with DMA obligations, but would then need to comply with new requirements for an entirely different category of services.

UK regulator already took action earlier

The European Commission is not the first regulator to scrutinise the cloud market. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigated the cloud infrastructure market and concluded that competition was not functioning optimally. The United Kingdom has already taken steps towards further regulation of major cloud providers on that basis.

The Commission is thus following a trend in which Western regulators increasingly view cloud infrastructure as a market with structural power imbalances that justify regulation. A final decision in Europe is expected before the end of 2026. Neither Microsoft nor Amazon has yet made any public statement regarding the anticipated designation.