AWS

Amazon Web Services 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. In June 2026 AWS became the infrastructure backbone of Warner Bros. Discovery's entire US advertising operation: WBD disclosed at Cannes Lions on 18 June that it is rebuilding media planning, demand forecasting, real-time campaign optimisation, and closed-loop measurement on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, with unified media planning due Q3 2026 and composable order management due Q4 2026, extending AWS's reach from compute into the advertising supply chain. In April 2026, Amazon separately announced €33.7 billion of European cloud and AI infrastructure investment spanning Aragón and several other regions, one of the largest single cloud investment commitments in EU history.

AWS is subject to the US CLOUD Act, a persistent sovereignty concern for European enterprise customers, and was named in the European Commission's formal DMA interoperability probe opened in 2025. AWS was excluded from the EU's €180 million sovereign cloud procurement awarded in April 2026 to four unnamed European providers. In January 2026, a Coalition led by Ecologistas en Acción filed at the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Aragón challenging the regional government's agreement with Amazon covering 30 data centre buildings and 10 electrical substations across four Aragonese locations, on grounds of projected water consumption and infrastructure impact; construction runs 2027 to 2031. Amazon publishes no electricity consumption figures, a transparency deficit flagged alongside Microsoft's water disclosure.

European cloud sovereignty advocates, including OVHcloud, Hetzner, and Scaleway, have welcomed both the DMA probe and the sovereign procurement exclusion as validating their argument that hyperscaler pricing is anti-competitive. AWS's European data centres in Ireland, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Milan, Paris, and Zurich remain subject to the US CLOUD Act despite their EU jurisdiction. The WBD Bedrock AgentCore deployment illustrates how hyperscalers are no longer competing only for storage and compute: they now compete for the agentic layer governing how major broadcasters plan and execute campaigns across linear and streaming inventory.