THE CRUNCH
Amazon Web Services looks set to win more than £1 billion of UK taxpayers' money under a Home Office contract renewal for public cloud hosting. A planning notice published on October 30 puts the estimated value at £881,621,007, which passes the billion-pound mark once VAT is included. AWS holds the existing contract, won in 2023 for about £450 million.
Once awarded, the contract is expected to run from December 2027 to December 2029, with a possible extension to December 2031. A market engagement event for bidders on the G-Cloud 15 Lot 1A framework is scheduled for December 8. The Home Office would not say who else is being considered, saying it does not comment on ongoing procurement. The Register has asked the Home Office why the figure has risen so sharply, and has asked AWS to comment.
The timing is awkward for Whitehall, which has acknowledged its dependence on US hyperscalers. An internal Cabinet Office document seen by The Register in 2024 admitted that vendor lock-in inhibits the government's negotiating power over cloud vendors, and that the dominance of AWS and Azure is set to continue. That concern sits within a broader European debate about digital sovereignty: a survey found about three-quarters of businesses in the UK, France and Germany fear Washington could abruptly cut off access to US tech platforms, and the Open Rights Group warned politicians earlier this year that the UK relies too heavily on US companies to run critical operations.
The scale of AWS's grip is not unique to this deal. According to public sector intelligence platform BidSkim, AWS takes 75 percent of government money spent on cloud contracts, worth about £1.22 billion. Microsoft Azure holds more contracts but smaller ones, totalling £355 million, with Google Cloud on £47 million and Oracle Cloud $15 million. The government has pledged to steer more work to smaller suppliers, adding local providers to G-Cloud 15 in August, though a place on the framework guarantees no business, and The Register notes similar pledges in 2005, 2013, 2016 and 2018 largely came to nothing.