A designation the law's own numbers don't support
On June 25, 2026, the European Commission and the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) announced a joint preliminary finding: Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the largest and second-largest cloud computing services operating in the EU, should be designated as "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act. The finding is notable less for the target than for the mechanism. AWS and Azure do not meet any of the DMA's quantitative thresholds for automatic designation — the Commission is reaching for a discretionary clause instead.
The DMA's Article 3(2) sets out a bright-line test: a company qualifies as a gatekeeper if it clears €7.5 billion in annual EU turnover (or €75 billion in market capitalization) across three consecutive years, operates in at least three member states, and serves at least 45 million monthly active end users and 10,000 business users a year. AWS and Azure clear the revenue and geographic bars easily. They fail the user-count test, because cloud infrastructure customers are enterprises procuring compute, not consumers opening an app — a structural mismatch between how hyperscale cloud sells and how the DMA counts.
Rather than let that mismatch settle the question, the Commission invoked Article 3(8), which lets it designate a company as a gatekeeper through a full market investigation if it can show "significant impact on the internal market," status as "an important gateway" for business users reaching customers, and an entrenched, durable position — regardless of whether the numeric thresholds are met. This is the first time the clause has been used against cloud infrastructure rather than a consumer-facing platform.
The case for using it
The steelman is real. Enterprises that build on AWS or Azure face genuine switching frictions: proprietary APIs, egress fees on data leaving the platform, and increasingly, AI tooling — foundation-model access, managed inference, fine-tuning pipelines — bundled tightly enough into each cloud's ecosystem that migrating a workload means rebuilding it. The Commission's preliminary finding leans specifically on this, citing lock-in effects, high switching costs, and the growing role of AI-cloud partnerships in procurement decisions as evidence that AWS and Azure function as gateways even without the consumer scale the DMA was drafted around. The market investigations behind this finding were opened on November 18, 2025, alongside a third, broader probe into whether the DMA's toolkit fits cloud competition at all — suggesting Brussels itself isn't certain the law was built for this fight, even as it presses ahead.
If the DMA's ex-ante model has value anywhere, it's plausibly here: infrastructure chokepoints that entrench themselves through data gravity and integration costs rather than headline user counts. A regulator that only ever acted on the numeric thresholds would structurally miss B2B gatekeepers by design.
Where the proportionality argument breaks down
But the DMA's thresholds aren't an oversight — they're the mechanism that gives the law its main selling point: predictability. A company can look at its own revenue, market cap, and user numbers and know, before any investigation, whether the DMA's interoperability, anti-self-preferencing, and data-portability obligations apply to it. Article 3(8) exists as a narrow backstop for genuinely borderline cases, not as a second designation track to be reached for whenever the first one produces an answer regulators don't like. Applying it here, for the first time, to infrastructure providers rather than consumer platforms, converts a backstop into a precedent that any large B2B technology vendor could plausibly be pulled into next.
The remedy mismatch compounds this. The DMA's playbook — interoperability mandates, anti-steering rules, restrictions on self-preferencing across "core platform services" — was built for search engines, app stores, and messaging apps, where the competitive harm runs through consumer defaults and network effects. Cloud IaaS/PaaS competition problems are narrower and already have a narrower fix: the EU's own Data Act requires cloud providers to eliminate switching and egress charges entirely by January 12, 2027, precisely the lock-in mechanism the Commission's preliminary finding cites. Layering full DMA gatekeeper status — and the compliance apparatus that comes with it — on top of a remedy already in motion adds cost and legal uncertainty without a clearly identified additional harm to fix.
That uncertainty has a price. The EU is simultaneously courting cloud and AI infrastructure investment through its sovereign-compute push, while telling its two largest cloud investors that further scale in Europe risks discretionary regulatory exposure the statute's own numbers say shouldn't apply to them yet. AWS and Microsoft now have until September 2026 to submit written representations contesting the finding; a final decision is expected before the end of 2026, and if confirmed, the companies would have six months to comply. Given the novelty of applying Article 3(8) this way, an appeal to the EU courts — as other companies have pursued against their own DMA designations — is a near-certainty, meaning the practical question of whether cloud gatekeeper obligations ever take effect may not be settled until well into 2027 or beyond.