Sri Lanka issues GovCloud 3.0 RFI

Sri Lanka is sounding out the market for a new sovereign government cloud and related data-center buildout, with artificial intelligence capacity written into the brief. (mode.gov.lk) A Request for Information published by the Board of Investment and the Ministry of Digital Economy says the government wants “sovereign, scalable” cloud infrastructure for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence workloads, and national digital services. The submission window in that notice ran from December 2, 2025 to January 8, 2026. (mode.gov.lk) The form sent to prospective investors asks for past projects delivered in the last five years, including data-center capacity in megawatts, certification level, and any artificial intelligence infrastructure. It also asks bidders to state a target certification, with the government preference listed as Tier III+1 or Tier IV, and to describe redundancy, resilience, and disaster-recovery measures. (mot.gov.lk) In plain terms, a sovereign cloud is government computing infrastructure kept under national control, with rules on where sensitive data sits and who holds the keys. Sri Lankan officials have been developing that model alongside a broader “cloud first” policy for state agencies. (mot.gov.lk; biometricupdate.com) That push has been tied to projects such as the National Data Exchange and Sri Lanka’s digital identity program, both of which increase the amount of sensitive public-sector data moving between agencies. Officials told Biometric Update in July 2025 that the government was weighing a mix of resident, sovereign, and public cloud options based on how sensitive each class of data is. (biometricupdate.com) Sri Lanka is not starting from zero. The existing Lanka Government Cloud says it serves more than 160 tenants, manages more than 170 virtual machines, hosts about 400 websites, and has been used by more than 200 government organizations. (lgc.gov.lk) The government was already trying to upgrade that base in 2025. A May 4, 2025 invitation for bids sought a provider for “cloud transformation” of the existing Lanka Government Cloud and required the primary bidder to own a Tier 3 or equivalent certified data center physically located in Sri Lanka, with at least one similar project worth at least 100 million Sri Lankan rupees in the previous five years. (mot.gov.lk) A separate Request for Information for Lanka Government Network 3 shows how the pieces fit together. That document describes a secure access network designed to connect agencies and field officers to workloads hosted across sovereign cloud regions and approved cloud service provider environments, while keeping centralized identity and policy controls. (mode.gov.lk) The emphasis on uptime and sovereign control also follows a disruption last year. In October 2025, local reporting said services on the Lanka Government Cloud were still affected after an outage, though the Information and Communication Technology Agency said there had been no data loss or security breach. (newswire.lk) What comes next is a procurement decision, not an automatic contract. The December-January market sounding said responses were non-binding, but it also said firms that matched the government’s technical and commercial goals could be invited into bilateral talks or later partnerships. (mode.gov.lk)