The cloud is touted as giving Australia the chance to "improve our ability to securely share and analyze our nation's most classified data at speed and at scale, and provides opportunities to harness leading technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning."

We understand that sum will cover the cost of building three dedicated datacenters, and establishing a local subsidiary of Amazon to run them and the cloud.

AWS declined to answer questions about arrangements in place to make this a sovereign cloud and referred us to the deputy PM, Richard Marles, who also serves as defence minister.

We asked his office for info on where the cloud will be housed, who will own the infrastructure, payment arrangements, and whether the job was put to open tender.

This deal won't change that stance: The Register is aware of government agencies building on-prem private clouds – sometimes on open source platforms – so they can scour code to soothe their security worries.

Saved 60% of original text.