The EU Is About to Call Microsoft and Amazon's Cloud Businesses "Big Tech" — And That Label Comes With Teeth
Brussels regulators are finalizing an investigation that's expected to conclude Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS meet the threshold for designation under the EU's Digital Markets Act — the same rulebook that already forces Apple, Google, and Meta to change how their platforms work in Europe.
Here's what's actually on the table:
→ A draft decision is expected in November, though the European Commission stresses the assessment is still ongoing and nothing is final yet
→ If designation goes through, Azure and AWS would have 6 months to comply with new obligations covering interoperability, customer lock-in, and self-preferencing
→ The timing matters: cloud infrastructure has become the foundation AI startups build on — GPUs, foundation models, databases, and developer tools are often bundled inside the same ecosystem, making it hard for a company to leave once it's in
→ This sits inside a bigger European anxiety about depending on non-European companies for critical digital infrastructure, right as compute has become a strategic resource rather than just a commercial one
Here's why this isn't just a regulatory footnote: the DMA was built to force platforms to let data and workloads move more freely between competitors. Applied to cloud, that could mean it gets genuinely easier for a European AI startup to switch cloud providers — or split workloads across several — without the switching costs and vendor lock-in that currently make that painful. For an industry where AI spend is already one of the biggest line items on a startup's balance sheet, procurement flexibility like that is not a small thing.
It also says something about how far "Big Tech" scrutiny has traveled. A few years ago this conversation was entirely about app stores and social feeds. Now it's reached the literal infrastructure layer everything else sits on top of — the servers running the AI models themselves.
Do you think forcing interoperability between cloud providers will actually bring down AI infrastructure costs for startups, or will Azure and AWS find new ways to keep customers locked in regardless?
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