On July 9, the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine allowed Kyivstar to acquire control over GigaCloud — a company that has been Ukraine's largest cloud provider by revenue since 2023. The deal went through nearly a year of proceedings: the first application was submitted to the AMCU in September 2024, the regulator rejected it in October, Kyivstar resubmitted documents in November, and only in July 2025 received the green light.
What Kyivstar is buying
GigaCloud is not a startup in growth stage. Last year, the company's revenue reached 561.4 million hryvnia (+37.1% year-over-year), and net profit grew by almost 3.8 times — over 130 million hryvnia. According to InVenture, citing corporate documents, the deal involves concluding a corporate agreement between Kyivstar and three GigaCloud shareholders: Nazlami Limited (48.43%), Telliani Limited (20.42%), and Zvityaga Limited (31.15%).
Beyond financial metrics, GigaCloud became the first in Ukraine to obtain the status of VMware Sovereign Cloud Provider — a certification confirming compliance with sovereign cloud standards: jurisdictional data control, accessibility, and independence. For corporate and government sector clients, this is not marketing — it's a tender requirement.
AMCU conditions: what Kyivstar committed not to do
The regulator identified an obvious anticompetitive risk: a company with the country's largest mobile and fixed subscriber base acquires dominant cloud infrastructure. For the deal to proceed, Kyivstar agreed to three key restrictions:
- Not to tie GigaCloud cloud services to its own telecommunications services — clients have the right to purchase cloud separately.
- Not to discriminate against clients based on which internet provider they use.
- Provide equal access to cloud services for everyone, regardless of their choice of communications provider.
Kyivstar has no right to tie the sale of GigaCloud cloud services to its own telecommunications services.
AMCU Decision from July 9, 2025
The AMCU committed to monitoring compliance with these conditions — but the specific monitoring mechanism is not disclosed in the public part of the decision. A similar situation has occurred with previous major telecommunications market consolidations: commitments are recorded, but their compliance is checked reactively — when there is a complaint, not preventively.
Why this matters beyond telecom
Cloud infrastructure in wartime is not just a business service. Government agencies, banks, media, and critical infrastructure are massively transitioning to domestic cloud solutions following data localization requirements. GigaCloud already serves financial monitoring entities and enterprise ERP systems. After the acquisition, Kyivstar becomes the only player that simultaneously controls both the communication channel and the data storage location of clients — a situation that in the EU already raises questions about vertical integration even without a dominant position.
Remaining competitive players include De Novo and international providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. But the sovereign segment, where physical data placement in Ukraine is required, where there is local support and pricing in hryvnia, effectively narrows down to two players.
If the AMCU does not disclose the details of the mechanism for monitoring compliance with commitments — the deal remains a concentration approval with declarative safeguards: the market will see the real consequences only when the first complaints from competitors or clients appear.
