The Digital Markets Act (DMA) was adopted to open up Europe’s digital economy by placing obligations on “gatekeepers”—companies with entrenched and systemic market power. Its goal is to ensure fair competition, reduce lock-in, and give SMEs and consumers more choice. The law has already begun to reshape platform markets such as search, social media, and app stores. Yet one of the most strategic sectors—cloud computing—remains largely untouched. Cloud services are formally listed as a “core platform service” under the DMA, but no provider has been designated as a gatekeeper.

This blind spot matters even more in a world where digital regulation is openly treated as a tool of geopolitics. Just recently, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that regulations like the DMA discriminate against “incredible American Tech Companies” and threatened tariffs and export restrictions in response. If Washington defends its tech giants as national assets, Europe must treat its competition laws as strategic leverage, not just consumer safeguards. Relenting would send the wrong signal. Instead, the EU should double down and make sure its flagship competition tool applies where it matters most: cloud—the backbone of the digital economy.

And the market reality could not be clearer. Europe’s cloud sector is dominated by three hyperscalers (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud) that together control more than two-thirds of the EU market. For SMEs, this dominance translates into high switching costs, opaque pricing, and contractual practices that make it difficult to move between providers. These are exactly the kinds of anti-competitive dynamics the DMA was designed to address—yet because its designation rules were written for consumer platforms, the largest cloud providers remain outside its scope.

The problem lies in the way the DMA defines a gatekeeper. Alongside turnover thresholds, companies must demonstrate at least 45 million monthly active end users in the EU. This makes sense for consumer-facing platforms, where active users are a clear measure of reach and power. But cloud is a business-to-business market. Counting “active monthly end users” is almost meaningless in this context: one enterprise contract may cover thousands of individual users, while a single government client may depend on an entire suite of services. By applying consumer metrics to enterprise infrastructure, the DMA leaves out exactly the players it was meant to capture.

The fix is simple. If the DMA’s designation methodology were adapted to reflect the B2B nature of cloud services, i.e., counting enterprise tenants, workloads, or contracts instead of consumer end users, then the major cloud providers would clearly qualify as gatekeepers. This would extend the DMA’s interoperability, anti-bundling, and self-preferencing obligations to the cloud market, giving SMEs and public administrations genuine alternatives and reducing dependency on a handful of global firms.

DIGITAL SME calls on policymakers to act. Extending the DMA to cloud through a technical adjustment of its designation rules would help level the playing field, unlock competition, and give Europe’s SMEs and innovators the choice and flexibility they need. Without this change, Europe will remain dependent on a small number of non-European providers at the very moment when sovereignty, resilience, and competitiveness are at the top of the agenda.