Defra plans £4.8m Atos colocation renewal for 2026

By Amara Osei

Defra plans to renew its colocation agreement with Atos at the Andover data center on December 4, 2026, in a three-year deal worth £4.8 million ($6.44 million) including VAT.

The pipeline notice says the new agreement can run for one additional year. Atos would supply rack space, power and cooling at the site on Shepherds Spring Lane. Defra’s stated reason is operational: the deal is “required in support [of] Defra’s future hosting and support contract,” the department said.

What is Atos being paid to provide?

Atos, a French technology company, would provide the physical hosting: rack space, power and cooling. DataCenterMap reports that the 58,000-square-foot site is leased to Atos.

The notice does not describe a new cloud platform, and it publishes no throughput, capacity or availability figures. That is the commercial reality beneath the procurement language.

The agreement supports the wider hosting contract rather than replacing it. Its fixed three-year term would carry Atos into 2029, with the optional extension reaching 2030.

How does it fit Defra’s wider hosting plan?

In August 2025, Defra put out a tender for future hosting and storage services valued at £294.6 million ($396.42 million). The winner or winners would provide digital services to six named bodies within Defra:

• Authority
• Environment Agency
• Rural Payments Agency
• Animal and Plant Health Agency
• Natural England
• Marine Management Organization

The service scope covers:

• Data center facilities management
• Cloud hosting services
• Infrastructure as a Service
• Platform as a Service
• Software as a Service

The £294.6 million tender dwarfs the £4.8 million colocation renewal. Defra says it relies on multiple suppliers for its IT infrastructure, so the two procurements can run alongside each other.

Defra signed a £20.8 million, about $25 million, deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2023. It also has a £23 million ($30.87 million) contract with AWS from 2025. The Atos renewal adds physical colocation to an estate that already includes AWS.

What security does Andover provide?

The facility sits on Shepherds Spring Lane in Andover, Hampshire, southwest of London. Computer Weekly described it as a “List X facility,” meaning it can hold UK government protectively marked information at “Secret” level or above.

That designation supports its suitability for sensitive public-sector work, but it is not a throughput claim, and the pipeline notice supplies no performance data. Beyond Defra, Atos has contracts with the Ministry of Defence, HM Revenue & Customs, the Home Office and the state-owned National Savings and Investment Bank. Those relationships give Atos an established government customer base, while this renewal remains limited to specified colocation services.

What did the NHS trust buy?

Buckinghamshire Health NHS Trust awarded Rackspace a £13.17 million ($17.68 million) contract for data center services, excluding VAT. The award notice says the package includes a virtual cloud service.

The trust made the award without a call for competition because it falls outside the scope of application of the regulations. It provided no further details, leaving the service mix, contract structure and delivery timetable undisclosed.

For buyers, the notice supplies a supplier and a headline value, but not a deployment roadmap. The virtual-cloud description contains no architecture, capacity or timing details.

The next observable milestones are the award of Defra’s £294.6 million hosting programme and the December 4, 2026 commencement of the planned Atos agreement. Whether Defra takes the optional fourth year will show how long the colocation requirement persists. For the NHS trust, the Rackspace notice leaves the commercial timetable unspecified.