TNB Tech Minute: Microsoft, AWS Could Face U.K. Probe into Cloud Services Market
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by American Express. Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Tuesday, January 28th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft and Amazon Web Services could face a probe by UK regulators after an independent inquiry found that each company has a 40% share of the cloud services market. The UK Competition and Markets Authority said today that the inquiry provisionally found that the lack of competition could result in higher costs, less choice, less innovation, and lower quality of service.

Microsoft's corporate VP and deputy counsel for competition law said the CMA's report should, quote, be focused on paving the way for UK's AI-powered future, not fixating on legacy products launched in the last century. The inquiry plans to make a final decision by early August.

Google is fighting a roughly $4.5 billion antitrust fine from the European Commission over its Android operating system. The 2018 fine is among the largest the European Commission has ever issued for antitrust abuses. It alleged Google unfairly used its dominance to strong-arm device manufacturers and network operators into making sure that traffic on Android devices goes to Google's own search engine.

Lawyers acting for Google said the company is being punished for its own success and that the commission made mistakes in its ruling.

And tech stocks rebounded today after China's low-cost AI player DeepSeek triggered a sell-off of stocks tied to artificial intelligence yesterday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 2%, the S&P 500 gained 0.9%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.3%. Chipmaker Nvidia surged nearly 9% after it tumbled 17% yesterday, which wiped out more than half a billion dollars in market cap.

Database giant Oracle gained 3.6%. The rebound suggested that some investors saw yesterday's sell-off as a buying opportunity. While the emergence of DeepSeek drove down the valuations of many AI-linked stocks, some executives have argued that cheap AI will ultimately hasten the adoption of the tech. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Wednesday's Tech News Briefing podcast.