HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS after competition melts away

Summary

The UK's tax collection agency has awarded Amazon Web Services – the only remaining bidder – a contract worth nearly £500 million to migrate services from three Fujitsu-run datacenters and host them for up to a decade. His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) said the British branch of AWS's Luxembourg-based subsidiary submitted the only tender it received and assessed for the deal in a contract award notice published on March 23. UK govt office admits ability to negotiate billions in cloud spending curbed by vendor lock-in READ MORE The agreement, priced at £472.8 million including VAT, is scheduled to run for a minimum of seven years from April 2026 with an option to extend it to ten years. HMRC can pay for extras including business services transformation, migration of services not run from the three Fujitsu datacenters, and application modernization. The "Procurement for the provision of Hyperscaler Services to enable Data Centre Exit" contract is intended to let the tax collector end its use of three datacenters managed by Fujitsu by June 2028. As the project's title suggests, the tender was aimed at the largest cloud suppliers. In its initial March 2025 contract notice, the total financial value was estimated at £500 million including VAT. HMRC said it "anticipated that the appointment will be limited to a single Hyperscaler" able to migrate services and infrastructure from the Fujitsu-run bit barns – which use about a dozen operating systems including HP's Unix, IBM's AIX, and Sun's Solaris – to UK-based cloud hosting. When it published the tender in June, HMRC added "Hyperscaler services" to the title and said "modern hyperscaler cloud technologies would be the preferred solution." The notice stated that 70 percent of the contract decision would be based on quality, with just 20 percent on price and 10 percent on social value, with the full list of criteria provided to shortlisted suppliers. Sources close to the bidding process told The Register in October t...