The UK Home Office has published a planning notice for the renewal of its public cloud services contract with an estimated value of £881,621,007, which passes £1 billion once VAT is included. Amazon Web Services won the department’s existing contract in 2023 for about £450 million, so the renewal is valued at nearly twice the current deal. The contract is expected to run from December 2027 to December 2029, with a possible extension to December 2031, and a market engagement event for suppliers on the G-Cloud 15 framework is scheduled for December 8.
The Home Office would not say which other suppliers are being considered, saying it does not comment on ongoing procurement. The Register asked the department why the value has risen so much and AWS for comment; neither had responded in the published reporting.
The notice lands against the government’s own diagnosis of its position. A Cabinet Office document previously reported by The Register acknowledged that the dominance of AWS and Microsoft Azure in UK government cloud is set to continue and that vendor lock-in inhibits the government’s negotiating power. Public sector intelligence platform BidSkim estimates AWS takes 75 percent of UK government cloud contract money, about £1.22 billion, against £355 million for Azure, £47 million for Google Cloud and $15 million for Oracle Cloud. A government pledge last month to steer more business to small and medium sized suppliers was also noted in the reporting; a place on the G-Cloud framework guarantees no business.
For the hyperscalers, contracts of this size are the durable part of the AI era revenue base: multi year, sovereign customer hosting that renews at rising values regardless of the model cycle. For the UK, the December 8 engagement event is the first test of whether any alternative supplier can credibly bid against that incumbency.