Amazon Web Services Inc. has won a contract with the U.K.’s spy agencies to host classified material in a deal aimed at boosting the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage.

The Financial Times reported today that the AWS deal was championed by GCHQ, the U.K.’s signals intelligence body, and will be used by MI5, MI6 and other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence during joint operations.

The new service is designed to host top-secret information securely and allow spies to share data more easily from field locations. The service will also power specialist applications such as speech recognition to identify distinct voices and will enable the spy agencies to conduct faster searches on each other’s databases.

Although details of the deal have not been publicly revealed, it’s estimated to be valued at between £500m ($689 million) to £1bn ($1.38 billion) over the next decade. The U.K. government has declined to comment, with a spokesperson for Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying that “we’ve used private-sector technology in national security applications for decades to keep the country safe.”

The spokesperson added that “obviously ensuring the security of this technology is an absolute priority and the same protects are afforded to classified information regardless of the provider of the technology used.”

The Times noted that the deal is likely to ignite concerns over sovereignty given that a vast amount of the U.K.’s most secret data will be hosted by a single U.S. tech company. Sources told the newspaper that all the agency’s data would be held in the U.K. and that Amazon will not have any access to information held on the cloud platform.

Professor Alan Woodward, a computer security expert at the University of Surrey, told Techxplore that Amazon had likely agreed to build a U.K. facility accessible only by the spy services.

AWS already has existing contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies, including a deal signed in November with the Central Intelligence Agency. That deal also included Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, Oracle Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. The National Security Agency also awarded AWS a $10 billion cloud computing contract in August.

Photo: Defence Imagery/Flickr