AWS

Amazon Web Services became subject to European Commission scrutiny in 2025 when the Commission opened formal DMA cloud interoperability probes into both AWS and Azure. The investigation centres on alleged practices — including egress fees, contractual lock-in, and technical barriers — that make it costly and difficult for European cloud customers to switch providers or run workloads across multiple clouds. The probes were opened concurrently with a broader push by the EU to enforce the DMA beyond the consumer-facing platform layer and into cloud infrastructure.

AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, launched in 2006 and now the world's largest cloud platform by market share, holding approximately 31% of global cloud infrastructure revenue as of 2024. Its European data centres are located primarily in Ireland, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Milan, Paris, and Zurich. AWS has signed data-processing agreements with EU sovereign cloud requirements in various member states and operates AWS GovCloud equivalents for regulated European sectors, though sovereignty advocates argue these structures do not remove US legal jurisdiction under the CLOUD Act.

The AWS cloud probes coincided with a sharp deterioration in US-EU trade relations following the Trump administration's tariff offensive. Washington signalled that actions under the DMA against US cloud providers could trigger Section 301 retaliatory measures. European cloud sovereignty advocates — including OVHcloud, Hetzner, and Scaleway — welcomed the investigation as validating their longstanding argument that hyperscaler pricing and data-portability terms were deliberately anti-competitive.