The European Commission on Wednesday issued a preliminary finding that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure each qualify as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act, making both cloud platforms subject to strict EU competition rules for the first time.
The designation is striking for what Brussels had to sidestep: neither AWS nor Azure meets the DMA’s standard quantitative thresholds, which require at least 45 million end users and 10,000 business users in Europe, plus €7.5 billion in annual EU turnover for three financial years. The Commission found them gatekeepers anyway, citing their “entrenched and durable position,” operational capacity and investments that have “significantly outpaced” competitors, and an AI-driven surge in cloud demand.
Both companies pushed back. Microsoft said it was engaging “constructively” with the Commission but warned that ignoring Google Cloud and Gemini would “tilt the market in a harmful way.” Amazon argued the findings “disregard the breadth of cloud services available to European customers” and pointed to a Copenhagen Economics study it commissioned showing more than 200 active European cloud providers holding roughly 15% of EU cloud revenue since 2022.
The more consequential question is structural: the Commission’s willingness to designate platforms that don’t hit the numeric thresholds means the DMA’s reach is governed more by market dynamics than by hard numbers. Google Cloud is the logical next candidate, as Microsoft’s own warning makes clear. Every enterprise cloud provider investing in AI capacity now has to ask whether it’s quietly crossed the gatekeeper line.
Both companies retain the right to respond before a final designation is issued. AWS and Azure already carry the gatekeeper label for other services — Wednesday’s finding extends that pressure to the core of their EU revenue.
James Okafor