When you check your flight, pay a bill online, or access your medical records on a hospital portal, there’s a point at which it’s hard to ignore how much of your everyday life depends on three businesses. Microsoft and Amazon. Google. Big Tech permeates everything, but not in the nebulous, ambient sense; rather, it does so structurally and concretely at the infrastructure level. The cloud beneath it all. And they own two-thirds of that cloud.
Enterprise cloud infrastructure revenues reached a record-breaking $106.9 billion in a single quarter in Q3 2025, a 28% increase year over year and the biggest growth the industry has seen in three years. The numbers are astounding, driven primarily by the AI boom and GPU-hungry models training on rented compute. However, it’s important to consider what those figures actually signify: a nearly unfathomable concentration of digital power in the hands of a very small number of corporations.
The physical scope of it is evident when you stroll through Northern Virginia’s business parks or the data center campuses outside of Dublin. These expansive, warehouse-like structures are humming with servers, encircled by perimeter fencing, and either barely labeled or unmarked. These form the foundation of the contemporary internet. Additionally, they are privately held, run with little transparency, and governed by laws that are decades behind what actually occurs inside.
AWS, Azure, and GCP’s dominance isn’t a coincidence and isn’t totally harmless. Yes, they achieved this through true technological innovation and exceptional financial investment. Building a cloud at scale is extremely costly, and they had the resources and pre-existing ecosystems to do so when others did not. However, less flattering information has been documented by competition authorities in Europe, the US, Australia, and Japan: opaque pricing structures, transfer fees that make switching providers difficult and costly, and a propensity to combine cloud services with other products in ways that covertly stifle competition.
It’s possible that the majority of businesses don’t completely understand what they’ve committed to. When a business decides to move its data to AWS or Azure, it is making a decision that will cost millions of dollars and years to undo. Just the egress fees—charges for transferring data out of a provider’s infrastructure—act as a silent tax on the act of departing. Speaking with enterprise IT leaders, it seems that many of them feel more like tenants in a building where the landlord also controls the locks than like customers.
This is made even more unsettling by the geopolitical aspect. Regardless of where the data is physically stored, a number of current U.S. laws, most notably the Cloud Act, mandate that American cloud providers provide data to the U.S. government upon request. Washington can request data from a company in Germany, a hospital in Singapore, or a government ministry in Brazil if it is stored on AWS servers. Regardless of how often that power is used, its very existence alters the calculations for all non-American organizations that use these platforms.
A gradual but noticeable shift toward regional providers is currently taking place, in part as a result of this. The cloud market in Western Europe expanded by 24% in 2025, and a significant amount of that growth went to European-owned providers whose data governance frameworks are fully under EU jurisdiction. The hyper-scalers most likely didn’t foresee this fragmentation, and regulators may have contributed to it by delaying the resolution of the data sovereignty issue.
This does not imply that Azure or AWS are villains in a straightforward narrative. They created something truly amazing, and a significant portion of the world’s productive activity is powered by the infrastructure they provide. However, admitting that and acting as though the concentration is harmless are two different things. It’s not a typical market dynamic when the same company that sells you cloud infrastructure also competes with your company, controls the marketplace you sell through, and lobbies the regulators who are looking into its behavior. It’s important to be truthful about that.
It’s difficult to ignore what transpired with telecommunications decades ago as you watch this play out. The structural logic makes sense, even though the analogy isn’t perfect. Eventually, regulators came to the conclusion that organizations whose business interests conflict with equitable access shouldn’t be in charge of vital infrastructure. These days, that infrastructure is the cloud. It’s not a radical idea to require transparent, nondiscriminatory access to cloud services, similar to how telecoms were eventually regulated. It makes sense. It is currently genuinely unclear whether governments have the political will to pursue it.
