• Cloud services in Europe are already highly competitive, with falling prices reflecting abundant options and billions of euros in new investments.
  • The European Union (EU) already has purpose-built cloud regulation in place. The Data Act directly addresses switching, portability, and interoperability, the same perceived concerns the European Commission's investigation examines.
  • Applying the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to cloud services risks undermining European competitiveness, deterring investment, and slowing innovation when Europe needs it most.

Customers of cloud services in Europe enjoy unprecedented choice among providers, falling prices, and extraordinary innovation opportunities, while cloud providers are making record investments in building new European infrastructure to keep up with the continuing growth across the region.

Against this backdrop, the European Commission has opened an investigation into whether Amazon Web Services (AWS) should be designated under the DMA, despite cloud services not being a gateway between businesses and their customers and being structurally different from the intermediary platforms the DMA targets.

DMA designation isn't warranted and risks stifling innovation and raising costs for European companies – at a time when AI and access to cutting-edge IT services is critical for all organisations in the EU. The cloud sector is highly competitive and already regulated by European legislation specifically designed for it.

A healthy and dynamic sector that is highly contested

Cloud services demonstrate all the hallmarks of healthy competition: new players, continuous innovation, declining prices, and substantial investment. These dynamics are fundamentally inconsistent with the market characteristics the DMA was designed to address.

According to Deloitte, more than 70% of European customers use multiple cloud providers. Furthermore, 85% of global IT spend remains on-premises. Customers can also combine AWS services with other IT providers, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle; European providers such as OVH Cloud, IONOS, and Scaleway; telecom providers like Deutsche Telekom and Orange Business Services; on-premises systems; or emerging providers. This is vastly different from the platforms the DMA was designed to address, where almost all Europeans use a single search engine, app store, or operating system daily with few meaningful alternatives.

AWS has committed tens of billions of euros to our data centres in France, Germany, Spain and beyond as well as billions more in developing new renewable energy infrastructure. These investments create valuable jobs beyond our own operations across local supply chains, fuel the growth of small and medium-sized businesses, and enable European companies to compete globally.

With these investments, we build services that support customers’ ability to build however they choose, whether that is with AWS, a hybrid solution, or multicloud, and we also support standards that promote interoperability and continuously innovate to deliver better value and efficiency.

The cloud sector is also attracting billions in investment across Europe. STACKIT has announced an €11 billion data centre in Germany; Google is investing billions in data centres and AI infrastructure continent-wide; Oracle is expanding with major investments in Germany and the Netherlands; and neo cloud providers like CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, and Nebius are also investing and growing in Europe. This level of new entry and capital commitment shows the sector is not entrenched as required for designation under the DMA.

Designating AWS as a 'gatekeeper' under the DMA — a framework designed for two-sided platforms, not enterprise cloud — will create genuine legal ambiguity about which obligations apply and to whom, since cloud computing services do not intermediate between end-users and business-users as required under the DMA. Europe's investment climate and the growth that flows from it depend on regulatory predictability. That uncertainty will affect all cloud providers. In concrete terms, it could slow or redirect the billions in infrastructure investment flowing into European data centres — taking jobs, skills, and capacity with it.

Europe already has cloud-specific regulation

Any decision to designate cloud services under the DMA will be particularly perplexing given the EU already regulates this sector through the Data Act. The Data Act establishes obligations that directly address the perceived concerns the Commission's investigation examines — switching costs, interoperability, and data access — by requiring cloud providers to facilitate multicloud adoption, ensure portability, and eliminate data transfer out fees for customers switching providers or reduce them for customers using multiple providers. These obligations, including new contractual requirements, have already created a framework ensuring 'contestability and fairness' in the cloud sector, which is the stated objective of the DMA.

And AWS is already well ahead of these obligations. We've long allowed customers to move 100 gigabytes of data per month free to any destination over the internet, and in 2024 we went further by waiving all data transfer out fees for customers who want to leave AWS entirely. To support portability and transparency, we've published an online registry detailing all data structures and formats for customer data export, alongside a contractual Addendum committing to a smooth and efficient switching process. Our commitment to interoperability and customer freedom is embedded in AWS’s principles, which you can read about here.

Layering DMA obligations atop this framework would create duplicative, potentially contradictory requirements at real cost to European organisations, especially given the sector is already competitive and comprehensively regulated.

AWS cloud services don't fit the DMA’s gateway model

The DMA's stated goal is to promote contestability and fairness for multi-sided platforms like search engines and social networks that intermediate between businesses and end users. Cloud simply does not fit this model.

When AWS provides compute or storage to a business customer, we have no relationship with, or visibility into, the solutions provided by these business customers to their end users. We don’t determine which businesses can reach which consumers, on what terms, or at what price. We provide technical building blocks to our customers that they combine with components from multiple suppliers to suit their specific needs. There's no intermediation, no network effects, no gateway.

Many businesses use cloud services purely for internal purposes—backend accounting, supply chain monitoring, manufacturing process control, data analytics—with no consumer-facing element whatsoever. There can be no gateway where there is no end user on the other side.

The competitiveness cost

Unnecessary regulatory complexity that creates unpredictability risks slowing the very investment and innovation the Commission seeks to protect. This investigation sends precisely the wrong signal, at a time when Europe is prioritising regulatory simplification and digital competitiveness. The Draghi Report and European businesses of all sizes identify overly restrictive regulation as a key cause of EU economic stagnation. Premature intervention in a sector that is thriving, at a time of unprecedented innovation, risks deterring the infrastructure investment foundational to Europe’s digital ambitions, diverting resources from innovation to compliance, stifling development just as AI transforms businesses across the economy, and disadvantaging European businesses through delayed access to cutting-edge technologies.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigated these same issues and recently decided not to designate AWS under their version of the DMA. That decision accurately reflects the remarkable competitiveness and dynamism in this rapidly changing sector, including the growth of alternative providers and industry-wide developments that have enhanced interoperability and customers’ ability to switch as they see fit.

The evidence supports a clear conclusion: applying the DMA to cloud services is unwarranted and risks undermining the innovation, investment, and competitiveness that Europe needs most.

The practical cost to Europe’s competitiveness is clear: European businesses get slower access to new AI and cloud capabilities, startups face higher costs to build and scale, and infrastructure investment, along with the jobs and growth it brings, flows to regions with more predictable regulatory environments.

Regulation should be shaped by what companies do, not where they come from. We're committed to Europe, and to the shared principles of trust, transparency, and fair competition that drive its digital ambitions forward.