AWS wins controversial £473m hyperscaler-only HMRC contract

The UK’s tax authority, HMRC, has awarded AWS a £473 million ($633 million) contract to migrate from three data centres to the public cloud. 

HMRC says not a single other company ultimately tendered for the huge piece of work – despite it being listed as a “competitive” procedure.

In June 2025 HMRC reportedly approached AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to participate in the request for information (RFI) stage. 

Computer Weekly in October suggested that Oracle and Microsoft swiftly withdrew, with Google and IBM later also voluntarily withdrawing. 

Ultimately, only AWS tendered for the contract, a March 23 contract notice showed – a striking fact given how hotly contested the cloud market is.

The hyperscaler declined to comment and referred The Stack to HMRC.

Other cloud providers also declined to comment.

One senior government technology leader told The Stack: “It sounds like the rest of the market decided it was written to favour only AWS…”