Amazon Web Services (AWS) has won the contract to supply datacentre services to HMRC through a contract designed to rid the UK government department of Fujitsu.
The 10-year contract, which is worth nearly £500m, is for services to help the HMRC exit three Fujitsu datacentres. Announced in May, the tender came as the government and HMRC in particular faced heavy criticism for its continued use of Fujitsu despite the Japanese supplier’s role in the Post Office scandal being out in the open.
It was a sign that HMRC, often described as a cash cow for Fujitsu, was ready to break away from Fujitsu amid public pressure in relation to the scandal. Fujitsu’s software was at the centre of the scandal, which has cost UK taxpayers billions of pounds. Fujitsu has continued to avoid commuting money towards paying scandal costs and has continued to win large government contracts.
HMRC was looking for a hyperscaler to provide services to enable it to exit three Fujitsu datacentres. It later emerged that AWS was the sole bidder for the tax agency’s contract.
“The objective of the programme is to exit all services from three managed datacentres and decommission any remaining infrastructure within the current contract period of the incumbent datacentre hosting provider (June 2028). The scope of the technical migration is currently all services supported by hardware in the three datacentres,” said the tender notice.
It was previously confirmed by HMRC in June 2025 that AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle were all approached to participate in the request for information portion of the multi-stage tender process for the deal. At some point over the following months, Oracle and Microsoft exited the process, and AWS, Google and IBM were provisionally shortlisted.
It is claimed that concerns about the tender being unfairly biased towards AWS were a factor in the suppliers’ decisions to withdraw. Sources have claimed HMRC pushed back on supplier suggestions that adopting a hybrid cloud setup might be a better, more cost-effective way to accommodate a migration off-premise, rather than a wholesale move to the public cloud.
The estimated length of the project also raised eyebrows, with concerns surrounding the risk of supplier lock-in tied to the contract being 10 years in length.
The notion that AWS was the only supplier left in the running for the contract also follows the Treasury Select Committee querying HMRC’s reliance on AWS’s US-based infrastructure, after the agency’s operations were disrupted on 20 October 2025 by Amazon suffering a 14-hour outage in its US-based datacentre region.
In response, a spokesperson for HMRC said at the time: “We follow government procurement rules when awarding contracts, ensuring a competitive and fair tender process, and value for money for taxpayers. Once contracts are approved, we publish the details on Contracts Finder for transparency.”
Computer Weekly first exposed the scandal in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history.