Australia secures $2 Billion deal with AWS to fortify intelligence

The Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, announced that Australia will shift its top-secret intelligence data to the cloud under an A$2 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services. It is the new frontier in efforts to increase interoperability between the defence force and the US.

Rachel Noble, Director General of the Australian Signals Directorate said that as part of this shift, the national security agency will also increase its use of artificial intelligence to analyse data. The movement will require the building of top secret data centres within Australia.

"Artificial intelligence is an important game changer for all of us in the intelligence community, and we are working to embrace the use of it in an ethical, well governed and well understood manner, where we understand very carefully when we bring AI tools into our environment how are they being used, what are they doing to the data and do we understand how carefully they need to be governed?" Noble said in Canberra on Thursday.

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Speaking with media, Marles said Amazon Web Services' distributed, purpose-built facilities would give better resilience to the data underpinning the defence force.

"If one server goes down you are still able to operate," she said. "This is what will ensure we have a common computing operating environment with the United States defence forces in the future."

According to the Director-General of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer, better interoperability with security partners—especially the United States—was a priority.

The deal between the Australian Signals Directorate and AWS, according to Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, will not only help or serve to benefit and strengthen national security capabilities but also create 2,000 local jobs.