Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what the Government Digital Service has done since its inception to encourage public sector organisations to improve their efficiency by shifting data from self-provided server rooms to AI-enabled data centres.

The government introduced a ‘Cloud First’ policy in 2013 for all technology decisions. Since then, under the former GDS/CDDO and new GDS, we continue to encourage adoption of cloud services, including those providing AI services from AI enabled data centres. We do this by developing policy and providing practical guidance and support to help organisations move to the public cloud. The 2023 update to the Government Cloud First policy strengthened the Cloud First mandate with public sector organisations now required to ‘default to cloud’. For organisations that cannot move services to the public cloud they should utilise Crown Hosting Data Centres.