EU cloud news, week of 2026-07-09

Brussels wrote the headlines this time: within a week, cloud lock-in became a competition matter under the Digital Markets Act, and Europe's infrastructure build-out got its own draft law. The provider news ran in parallel - one partnership deepening the European-owned stack, and two US security vendors adapting their products to European terms.

Brussels designates AWS and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act On 25 June the European Commission designated Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act - a first for cloud infrastructure, and notable because neither service met the law's quantitative thresholds. The Commission took the qualitative route instead, citing entrenched customer bases, lock-in effects, and the two providers' roughly 60 percent share of the European market. If the designation is confirmed, both companies have six months to comply with obligations designed to make switching realistic rather than theoretical. For a board, the practical meaning is a stronger negotiating position: the cost and difficulty of leaving your provider is now something European regulators act on, and every renewal negotiation from here on happens in that light.

The Commission proposes the Cloud and AI Development Act A week later, on 2 July, the Commission formally proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act, with a public consultation open until 27 August. The proposal aims to triple EU data-centre capacity within five to seven years through simplified permitting and easier access to energy and financing, to establish secure EU-based cloud capacity for critical applications where sovereignty and operational autonomy are treated as essential, and to build a common EU marketplace for cloud services. None of this is law yet, and the text will move during consultation and negotiation. The useful part for decision-makers is the direction: public-sector and critical-infrastructure procurement is being steered towards providers that are European-owned and European-operated, and any cloud strategy written for 2027 and beyond is worth testing against that logic now.

Scality and OVHcloud launch a joint sovereign storage platform Announced on 30 June, the expanded partnership packages Scality's S3-compatible object storage with OVHcloud's On-Prem Cloud Platform, plus a dedicated storage range on OVHcloud bare metal that serves as an off-site backup path with private S3 access. The pitch is storage for AI-scale datasets under full customer control, on your own premises or in a European-owned cloud, with no US hyperscaler in the chain. For technical teams this addresses the part of a migration that usually hurts most: the accumulated data. Compute moves easily; large datasets with compliance requirements attached do not, and a credible European-owned storage layer with a backup path built in makes that arithmetic easier.

Check Point and Rubrik bring their platforms to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud Check Point launched its Cloud Firewall on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud on 1 July, and Rubrik followed on 8 July with its Security Cloud, both citing the compliance frameworks that matter to regulated European buyers: BSI C5, DORA and NIS2. A growing partner ecosystem makes AWS's European offering more usable in practice, and for organisations whose requirement is data residency with familiar tooling, that is genuine progress. The precision worth keeping: AWS describes the environment as independently operated with customer data held inside EU borders, which answers the residency and operations questions - ownership and ultimate jurisdiction still sit with Amazon. Which answer your auditor, customer or board actually needs is the thing to settle before treating the two as interchangeable.

The throughline is who sets the terms: increasingly Brussels writes them, and providers on both sides of the Atlantic are now building to them.

Thinking about migration? Book a free consultation to discuss your situation.