The UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) is set to publish a tender notice for a four-year £180 million ($242.45m) contract for AI and computing capabilities services on August 1.

Under a new "Defence and Security Open Framework" which will operate as the delivery mechanism for ASGARD - the British Army's flagship Transformative Capability Initiative (TCI), the MOD is seeking bids related to Edge computing and storage solutions, "accelerators" for AI, and software and support services.

Split into five lots, the contracts under the framework are considered suitable for small and medium enterprises.

On the Edge side, the MOD is looking for "Edge computing and local storage for real-time, low-latency data processing." The notice adds: "Solutions should include containerized Edge nodes, tiered storage, and resilient, secure connectivity. Emphasis is on supporting distributed environments with limited or intermittent connectivity."

As for accelerators, while details are sparse, the notice states that the solutions should support model development, machine learning operations, synthetic data usage, and real-time inference, and that the focus is on "reducing time-to-insight and improving operational efficiency."

Other lots focus on data integration services, "enterprise-grade applications," and "expert services to support technology adoption and integration."

The current five Lots do not seem all-encompassing, however, with the Planned Procurement Notice stating that "more information, including the final scope of this framework, will become available in the future publishing of the Tender Notice and associated Tender Documents (anticipated in Q3 of 2025)."

Several of the lots add that additional compute services will be addressed separately, including "centralized compute and storage," "core infrastructure," and "foundational compute services."

Bidders have until 18 August, 2025, to submit, with an award decision date estimated for October 31, 2025.

In August of last year, the MOD put out a request for "Expressions of Interest" for a managed service provider for its Enterprise IT Platform, with a contract value of between £45m ($58.25m) and £60m ($77.67m). A previous Net Consulting case study has described the MOD as having a "vast, disparate data center infrastructure, with physical sites scattered across the British Isles, along with some use of the Cloud as well."

The MOD released a cloud strategy in February 2023, which set out an "explicit intent to coordinate and accelerate the most ambitious plans for hyperscale cloud adoption across Defence." In September 2023, DCD reported that the department was experiencing issues caused by its aging IT systems.