The European Commission is expected to deliver preliminary findings as early as the week of 22 June 2026 that would formally designate Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. Multiple credible outlets including The Next Web, Heise Online, and Silicon UK confirmed the development on 19 June, citing sources familiar with the Commission’s internal schedule. A final designation decision is expected before the end of 2026.

This represents a significant escalation from the market investigations the Commission opened in November 2025. Those investigations were framed as exploratory. Preliminary findings are the formal step that precedes a binding designation. If the preliminary findings are confirmed in the final decision, AWS and Azure would become the first cloud computing platforms subject to the full set of DMA gatekeeper obligations.

What the Digital Markets Act actually requires

The Digital Markets Act was designed to prevent large platform operators from using structural market power to disadvantage competitors, lock in customers, and self-preference their own products. Applied to cloud computing, the obligations that would follow a gatekeeper designation include:

Interoperability. AWS and Azure would be required to provide technical interfaces enabling customers and third-party providers to connect services across platforms. Vendor-specific APIs that currently create friction when moving workloads would need to be accompanied by open interoperability mechanisms.

Data portability. Customers would gain formal rights to export all data and configurations from AWS or Azure in formats compatible with other platforms. This goes beyond the data export tools both providers already offer, because it would carry legal enforceability rather than being a discretionary commercial feature.

Anti-self-preferencing. AWS and Azure would be prohibited from giving their own managed services, marketplaces, and tooling preferential treatment over third-party equivalents running on their infrastructure. Amazon’s practice of positioning its own database and compute services ahead of competitors in search results within its platform is among the behaviours under scrutiny.

Egress fee restrictions. Egress fees, the charges both providers levy when data leaves their networks, are expected to be a specific target. These fees currently function as a financial penalty for customers who attempt to move workloads to competing platforms or run multi-cloud architectures. The Commission views them as a structural switching cost that reinforces lock-in.

Why preliminary findings matter now

The Commission opened the DMA investigation because AWS and Azure did not initially meet the quantitative thresholds the DMA sets for automatic gatekeeper designation. Those thresholds cover annual revenue, active user numbers, and market position metrics. The Commission argued it had discretion to investigate regardless, based on the structural characteristics of the cloud market.

The preliminary findings expected next week will contain the Commission’s legal case for why both providers should be designated despite not meeting the quantitative triggers. Reports indicate the document will argue that AWS and Azure together hold over 60 percent of the European enterprise cloud market, that their combined market position creates conditions the DMA was designed to address, and that the switching cost barriers created by egress fees and proprietary service integration justify gatekeeper treatment.

Both Amazon and Microsoft are expected to contest the preliminary findings. The formal designation process includes a period for the companies to respond. That process, combined with the litigation either company could pursue, means the practical obligations are unlikely to take effect before mid-2027 at the earliest. But the direction of travel is now clear, and organisations that plan cloud architecture on a two to three year horizon should be incorporating the anticipated regulatory outcomes into their decisions today.

What this means for European organisations on AWS or Azure

The DMA gatekeeper designation will not create immediate compliance obligations for cloud customers. It imposes obligations on the platforms themselves, not their users. But the downstream effects on how European enterprises use AWS and Azure will be significant.

Cloud contracts will change. Data portability rights enshrined in law rather than negotiated contractually will alter the commercial relationship between enterprises and their cloud providers. Organisations that have accepted unfavourable egress terms because the cost of moving workloads was prohibitive will gain a regulatory backstop.

Lock-in exposure becomes a legal rather than a purely commercial question. Audit processes for cloud spending and architecture will need to account for the rights customers now have, and whether cloud provider behaviour is consistent with the obligations the DMA imposes.

European provider alternatives are more viable than ever. STACKIT, Scaleway, Hetzner, and OVHcloud have collectively invested heavily in managed services over the past two years. The gap between hyperscaler and European provider capability has narrowed substantially for standard workloads. Organisations reviewing cloud architecture in light of the DMA findings will find more credible alternatives than existed when their current contracts were signed.

Regulatory compliance teams need to engage now. The preliminary findings create a documented regulatory trajectory. Boards and compliance functions that track EU digital regulation have a specific timeline to plan around. The designation process will take months, but cloud strategies that assume the current regulatory environment will persist are being built on an assumption the Commission is actively dismantling.

The sovereign cloud parallel

The DMA gatekeeper proceedings run in parallel with the Commission’s broader sovereign cloud push. Earlier in 2026, the Commission awarded a six-year cloud services contract worth up to €180 million exclusively to European providers: STACKIT, Scaleway, Post Telecom, and Proximus. France moved the national Health Data Hub from Microsoft Azure to Scaleway. Both developments reflect the same policy direction: European institutions are expected to use European cloud infrastructure where technically feasible, and regulatory pressure is being applied to make the hyperscaler alternative less commercially advantageous.

For private sector organisations, the sovereign cloud requirement does not yet apply in the same mandatory way it does to EU institutions. But the regulatory environment is converging in a direction that makes proactive cloud architecture review a sound risk management decision, not a response to an abstract future obligation.

If your organisation is running significant workloads on AWS or Azure and wants to understand the practical implications of the coming DMA gatekeeper designation, assess your exposure to lock-in and egress costs, or evaluate European provider alternatives for specific workload categories, contact Excello Digital. We help European organisations make cloud architecture decisions that account for both the technical landscape and the regulatory environment it operates within.