EU Commission May Name AWS and Azure DMA Gatekeepers
The European Commission is expected to designate Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), according to reporting by Bloomberg. A draft decision may be adopted in November 2026, although the timetable remains subject to change.
The potential designation follows the Commission’s preliminary assessment issued in June. AWS and Azure do not appear to meet the DMA’s standard quantitative thresholds based on turnover, market value, and user numbers. The Commission is instead considering a designation based on a qualitative assessment of their position as important gateways between business users and end users.
The Commission considers the two cloud providers to have substantial and durable customer bases in the EU. It has also raised concerns that high switching costs may limit customers’ ability to move workloads, data, and applications to competing providers. The preliminary assessment further noted that demand for AI computing may increasingly remain within the providers’ own cloud ecosystems.
If designated, AWS and Microsoft Azure would have six months to comply with the DMA obligations. These could require measures supporting interoperability, data portability, and effective switching between cloud providers. The services would also be prohibited from unfairly favoring the providers’ own products or services over third-party offerings.
Non-compliance may result in fines of up to 10% of a company’s worldwide annual turnover, rising to 20% for repeated infringements. Both Amazon and Microsoft are already designated gatekeepers for other core platform services, including Amazon’s marketplace and Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The proposed cloud designations would extend DMA scrutiny into the EU cloud infrastructure market.
AWS has argued that cloud services are already covered by the EU Data Act and warned that additional DMA obligations could reduce investment. Microsoft has maintained that Europe’s cloud market is innovative and competitive. The Commission opened its investigations in November 2025 and is required to complete them within approximately 12 months.
