The European Commission is targeting nearly every layer of the artificial intelligence value chain — cloud infrastructure, training data, and chatbot distribution — in a wave of parallel antitrust investigations that regulators say is designed to prevent any single company from locking up the emerging AI ecosystem before competition law can catch up.
“We are looking at the entire AI stack,” EU competition chief Teresa Ribera told the International Conference on Competition in Berlin earlier this month, outlining a strategy that covers not just AI applications but the underlying models that power them, the data those models are trained on, and the cloud infrastructure and energy sources at their foundation.
The scope of the campaign was mapped in an analysis published by MLex on March 20. Ribera is traveling to the US this week to meet with the CEOs of Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Amazon — a signal that enforcement conversations have moved beyond Brussels.
The cloud probes operate under the Digital Markets Act, with the Commission examining whether Amazon’s and Microsoft‘s cloud platforms should be formally designated as core platform services subject to gatekeeper obligations — and whether their market power creates structural barriers for AI developers trying to access the computing resources necessary to compete.
On data access, the Commission is investigating whether Google violated competition rules by using content from web publishers and YouTube videos to train its generative AI models without adequate compensation or opt-out rights. Regulators say Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode exploit third-party content to entrench its search dominance while cutting publishers off from the traffic and revenue those clicks would otherwise generate.
The chatbot distribution case against Meta is the furthest along. The Commission formally opened that investigation in December 2025 after Meta blocked rival AI assistants from the WhatsApp Business Platform while keeping its own Meta AI accessible.
On February 9, 2026, the Commission issued a Statement of Objections — its provisional finding that the policy “appears at first sight to be in breach of EU competition rules” — and said it was prepared to impose interim measures to halt the restriction while the investigation continues.
Meta has since floated a revised proposal that would replace the outright ban with access fees. The Commission is now evaluating whether that change adequately addresses the competition concern. A WhatsApp spokesperson previously called the original claims “baseless.”
The probes run on two legal tracks. Traditional antitrust law requires proving abuse of dominance and consumer harm. The Digital Markets Act imposes obligations on designated gatekeepers before harm materializes — a faster enforcement path that Brussels has deliberately used to stay ahead of market tipping points.
Violations of either framework can carry fines of up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenue, with DMA repeat violations reaching 20%.
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