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Amazon's cloud service AWS: particularly lucrative
Photo: Salvador Rodriguez, REUTERS
Britain’s secret services are said to have made a deal with Amazon. The Financial Times reports. Accordingly, the espionage authorities have hired Amazon's cloud service Amazon Web Service (AWS) to process confidential material. The aim is to make greater use of data analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) for espionage, wrote the Financial Times. In the agreement with the cloud service unit from Amazon.com, the data of all local authorities in Great Britain will be stored, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the conversations.
The British spy agency "Government Communications Headquarters", GCHQ for short, had advocated a high-security cloud system that is to be used by the sister services MI5 and MI6 as well as by other government agencies in joint operations, the report said.
The monitoring service had already announced in February that they were using artificial intelligence to uncover patterns in huge amounts of data around the world.
Among other things, this is intended to find disinformation or criminal material.
Secret service does not comment
So far, neither of the two business partners has confirmed the order: At the request of the Reuters news agency, GCHQ stated that it would not comment on reports on its business relationships with technology providers.
AWS was initially not available for comment.
Amazon's cloud service AWS is by far the largest cloud service in the world.
According to a report by the Synergy Research Group, Amazon's market share was more than 30 percent.
AWS is also one of the most lucrative parts of the group: Although AWS sales in 2020 only accounted for about a tenth of Amazon's total sales, almost half of the group's net profit was attributable to AWS.
How important AWS is for the group is also shown by a personnel: In July, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos handed over his chief position to former AWS boss Andy Jassy.
jlk / Reuters
