Cloud concentration in the agent era

Most of the world's cloud runs on three companies. In the third quarter of 2025, Amazon, Microsoft and Google together took 63 per cent of worldwide spending on cloud infrastructure services, up from 62 per cent a year earlier, according to Synergy Research Group. Amazon held 29 per cent, Microsoft 20 and Google 13, in a quarter worth $106.9 billion.

Europe is more concentrated still. Synergy's July 2025 analysis found that European providers hold about 15 per cent of their home market, a share that fell from 29 per cent in 2017 and has not moved since 2022. The three US hyperscalers account for about 70 per cent of the European market. The largest European providers, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, hold about 2 per cent each.

These are two different measures and should not be blended. The 63 per cent is a global quarterly figure. The 15 per cent is a European figure drawn from 2024 data and an estimate for the first half of 2025. Both point the same way.

Europe has moved from rules on switching to rules on structure

The EU Data Act entered into force on 11 January 2024 and has applied since 12 September 2025. Its cloud chapter gives customers a legal right to leave a provider. In outline, as Travers Smith summarises it: a customer can start a switch on no more than two months' notice; the transition itself should take no more than 30 calendar days, with limited extensions; and the customer keeps at least 30 days to retrieve its data afterwards.

The fee rules phase in. Until 11 January 2027, a provider may charge for switching, including data egress, but only its direct costs, with no overheads. From 12 January 2027, switching charges are prohibited. Egress is not banned outright: a provider may still charge cost-based fees for data moved during ongoing parallel use of several clouds, and proportionate early-termination fees in fixed-term contracts survive.

The next instruments go further. On 18 November 2025 the European Commission opened three market investigations under the Digital Markets Act: two into whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers even though they fall below the Act's quantitative thresholds, and one into whether the Act's obligations fit cloud at all. On 25 June 2026 the Commission told both companies of its preliminary view that their cloud services should be designated. That is not yet a final decision; the companies can respond first.

On 3 June 2026 the Commission also proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act, COM(2026) 502. It has three aims: research and innovation in cloud and AI, faster data centre deployment across the EU, and a single EU-wide method for assessing cloud and AI sovereignty, with a mechanism for public-sector adoption. It is a proposal. It binds no one until the European Parliament and the Council agree a text.

The UK chose commitments over designation

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority published the final decision of its cloud market investigation on 31 July 2025. It found that competition was not working well and recommended that the CMA prioritise strategic market status investigations into the two largest providers, Microsoft and AWS, under the digital markets regime.

On 31 March 2026 the CMA took a different route. According to Tech Policy Press, it accepted voluntary commitments from AWS and Microsoft to remove or reduce egress fees and to improve interoperability, with a review of progress after six months, instead of opening cloud designation investigations. It said it would open a separate strategic market status investigation into Microsoft's business software, covering productivity software, operating systems, database management and related security services, from May 2026.

The US treats the question as one of trade

Washington has not adopted cloud-switching rules of its own. Its stated position is about other countries' rules. The 2026 National Trade Estimate Report, released by the US Trade Representative on 31 March 2026, catalogues foreign measures it treats as barriers to US firms. As Michael Geist's reading of it sets out, those include EU cloud certification and sovereignty requirements, the Digital Markets Act cloud investigations and the Data Act's switching and data-transfer obligations, alongside data-sovereignty measures in many other countries.

So the three largest regulatory blocs now hold three different views: Europe is legislating on structure, the UK is relying on commitments with a backstop, and the US is defending its providers abroad.

Why agents raise the stakes

Most of this debate was framed around workloads: virtual machines, storage, databases. The question was whether a company could move them, and at what cost.

An agent is a different kind of tenant. To do useful work it needs compute to run on, an address to send and receive messages, a way to pay for things, and a record of what it did and why. If all four come from one provider, the provider holds more than the workload. It holds the agent's identity as others see it, its ability to spend, and the evidence of its decisions.

That changes what lock-in costs. Moving a database is a data-transfer problem, which the Data Act now addresses. Moving an agent whose correspondence history, payment credentials and audit trail all live inside one provider's services is closer to moving a member of staff, their mailbox, their company card and their files at once. The switching rules help with the first part; they do not by themselves make the others portable.

It also concentrates operational risk. An outage, a policy change or a dispute at the provider no longer just stops a workload. It can stop an agent from answering mail, settling a payment or proving what it did yesterday.

What this means for policy and executive readers

For policymakers, the existing instruments are a starting point rather than an answer. Switching rights cover data egress and contract terms. They say little about the record an agent leaves, who can read it, or whether it can be taken elsewhere. Interoperability work under the Digital Markets Act and the sovereignty assessment proposed in the Cloud and AI Development Act are the natural places to ask those questions while the texts are still open.

For executives, the practical step is to treat each of the four functions as a separate decision. Ask where an agent's compute runs, who issues its address, who moves its money and under which licence, and where its record sits and in what form you can export it. Keep the domain and the record under your own control wherever you can, because those are the parts that are hardest to rebuild.

Where Praecise fits

Praecise is an agent cloud on machines it owns. Praecise Cloud provides compute, MCP servers and backends for agents on hardware Praecise owns, built from source, supervised and reversible. Praecise Inbox gives each agent and person an address on a domain the business verified once, with everything said kept in one record a person can open and search. Skerry provides payment rails for agents, including stablecoin settlement; Bridge and Stripe perform the regulated acts under their own licences. Ipnops runs agents across payments, accounting, commerce and mail with permission, never ownership, inside limits the owner sets, and every run leaves a record.

Underneath is Furcate, the open-source operating system Praecise develops and stewards at furcate.org under the Apache-2.0 licence. Everything that makes a trust claim is open, and so is everything a person needs to build a private, local AI system of their own on boards they can buy.