The European Commission’s decision to launch three market investigations into the cloud computing sector under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) marks an acknowledgment that the balance of power in cloud infrastructure is becoming too concentrated, too critical, and too consequential to leave unchecked.
At the heart of the scrutiny are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, whose influence extends far beyond traditional market boundaries. On paper, neither meets the DMA’s quantitative thresholds to be designated as gatekeepers. In practice, however, they increasingly serve as ** indispensable gateways** to AI development, enterprise IT, and public-sector digital systems across Europe. The question regulators are now asking is not how big they are, but how much control do they exert.
This investigation doesn’t emerge in isolation. With AWS, Azure and Google Cloud commanding 67% of the global cloud market, shifting workloads or pursuing multicloud strategies has become both technically complex and economically restrictive. The U.K.’s competition authorities have already warned that switching barriers are limiting customer choice, a warning now amplified at the EU level.
By examining issues such as interoperability constraints, bundled services, restricted data access and imbalanced contracts, the Commission is effectively probing whether the cloud ecosystem still embodies fairness and competition, or whether structural advantages have hardened into strategic dependencies. The parallel inquiry into whether the DMA itself needs updating underscores what is really at stake: the rules may no longer fit the reality.
Meanwhile, enterprises are voting with their architecture. 84% of cloud leaders now deliberately choose multicloud, and 41% have begun repatriating workloads back to on-premises systems amid geopolitical and regulatory uncertainty. When customers begin redesigning their infrastructure defensively, it becomes clear that trust in the market’s natural equilibrium is eroding.
Europe’s investigations could reshape the cloud landscape for the next decade, determining whether AI and digital transformation unfold on open terrain or under the concentrated governance of a few hyperscale actors. For technology leaders, this is not a distant policy discussion. It is an inflection point.
