Crown Hosting Data Centres, a government-focused colocation service provider formed by a joint venture between Ark Data Centres and the UK’s Cabinet Office, has secured a £1m ($1.34m) data center contract with the Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust, as listed on Find a Tender.

The Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust provides health services across the county of West Sussex, as well as the city of Brighton and Hove.

NHS Foundation Trusts are semi-autonomous organizations under the NHS that operate with more freedom.

A representative from the trust said that it had placed its first service request as of January 14, 2025.

The award of this contract runs counter to the ideas put forward by those who have been pushing for the NHS to stop investing in data centers and instead move its services to the cloud.

In November 2024, the then-CIO of NHS England John Quinn said that NHS trusts should “buy the service from a cloud provider. This is low-value, high-commodity stuff that you shouldn’t do yourself.”

But trusts across the UK, like Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust, still operate and source data center services. Last November, the Somerset NHS Foundation Trust gave a contract to Secure I.T. Environments for the deployment of a modular, containerized data center.

Crown Hosting Data Centres currently provides colocation services for the Bank of England, the London Ambulance Service, the NHS Arden Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit, the Crown Commercial Service, the Ministry of Justice, and the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency, among other customers.