EU plans to designate AWS and Azure as DMA gatekeepers in November
Tags Industry · AI / ML
The European Commission plans to name Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act in November, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The draft decision would confirm the Commission's June preliminary view that AWS and Azure are a key gateway between businesses and their customers, despite neither meeting the DMA's usual size and user-number tests. Once designated, Amazon and Microsoft would have six months to comply with rules barring self-preferencing and requiring interoperability and data portability. The Commission opened the cloud investigations in November 2025; firms that breach the DMA face fines of up to 10% of global sales, or 20% for repeat breaches.
Technical significance
Designating the two largest cloud providers as gatekeepers would extend DMA obligations to infrastructure, not just consumer platforms, and could force changes to how AWS and Azure bundle AI compute with their own services. The Commission's reasoning that both keep new AI demand inside their ecosystems signals that AI-era lock-in is now a competition concern.