Cloud Is the New Gatekeeper
Reuters reported that EU antitrust regulators have preliminarily concluded that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act — a classification that would impose stricter requirements around self-preferencing, interoperability, and data portability. The EU’s concerns include the scale of each platform’s user base, their AI partnerships, their operational capacity, and the high switching costs customers face when they try to move between providers. Both companies have pushed back, warning the designation could undermine investment and innovation.
This is not primarily a cloud computing dispute. Cloud infrastructure is where AI gets built, deployed, and scaled. The companies that control compute access, storage capacity, model partnerships, and enterprise contracts control the conditions under which artificial intelligence can exist as a competitive market rather than as a product of a small number of incumbents. Switching costs are not just a pricing question — they are a barrier to the kind of experimentation and competition that produces alternatives to the dominant systems.
The implications run in several directions at once. For startups, cloud dependence can determine whether they can scale at all, or whether they are building on infrastructure they can neither afford to leave nor fully trust. For governments, public digital systems that run on private cloud infrastructure carry a different kind of accountability risk than systems built on public or interoperable alternatives. For smaller competitors, the question is whether the market is genuinely open or whether it is a market rented from the companies that built it.
The AI race is not only happening inside model labs and chatbot interfaces. It is happening in the server contracts, energy agreements, and infrastructure layers that most people do not see and most coverage does not reach. The EU’s gatekeeper designation push is the regulatory system beginning to catch up to a concentration of power that has been building quietly for years.
