HMRC is spending £175 million getting its data cleaned up and modernised, as it plans a wholesale shift from legacy data centres to AWS by 2028.
The tax authority has contracted British data firm Quantexa to overhaul its “core data infrastructure” under the wide-ranging ten-year new partnership.
That’s the latest large digital transformation contract awarded by one of the UK’s largest departments, which is investing heavily in technology.
In March it awarded sole-bidder AWS a £473 million ($633 million) contract to migrate applications running on three Fujitsu data centres to the cloud.
HMRC’s Quantexa deal
Quantexa, founded in 2016 by former BAE Systems and EY executive Vishal Marria, said the agreement will see it help give the tax authority a “clearer, connected view of its data to improve performance, help identify tax at risk, and strengthen control” and establish “the groundwork for advanced AI.”
Marria said in a canned statement today: “We are helping HMRC improve how public sector organizations make confident, informed decisions.
“This is a blueprint for how the UK government deploys AI at scale.”
The UK’s tax, payments and customs authority has recently been investing hundreds of millions in modernising what the National Audit Office (NAO) in 2025 called “one of the largest and most complex IT estates in the UK.”
(The tax authority is running applications on an eclectic array of systems, including HP-Unix, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, VMware ESXi, Windows, MWG-MLOS, and NetApp ONTAP, earlier public tender notices revealed.)
The Quantexa work comes as it readies for the ambitious cloud migration.
HMRC says it wants the migration done and legacy hardware decommissioned by the time Fujitsu’s contract runs out in 2028.
The AWS contract may expand to include “cloud native refactoring, containerisation” and “reengineering of migrated services” it said – as well as “data archiving and purging”. Having data cleaned up enough to ensure it can make the most of the cloud services available to it will be critical.
Government data is, broadly, a mess
The contract comes as the Open Data Institute decried the broader state of government data. In a paper criticising the lack of momentum around a National Data Library (NDL), a linchpin of January 2025’s AI Action Plan, the ODI commented (whilst building a pilot “NDL-lite”) that the flagship data.gov.uk site “hardly fits our requirements for supporting innovation.”
“Datasets published on the website have non-standardised, inconsistent contents and do not even adhere to a single format for date columns of time series data. Structured data has been published in thirteen different file formats and metadata is almost non-existent,” the ODI lamented.
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