Use the cloud? These three American companies are fleecing you

Three American companies own nearly all of them in the UK: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Between them, they control around the majority of the UK's cloud infrastructure. The problem is they don't just control the infrastructure - they're hoovering up the components that power everything else.

Here's how it lands on your bills. Data centres are now buying up 70% of all memory chips manufactured globally. That means the RAM in your phone, laptop, or gaming console costs manufacturers three times as much as it did last year. If you bought a new phone in 2026, you paid roughly £100 more than you would have a year ago. A new laptop costs 8-20% more. Gaming consoles are predicted to jump 20-30% by mid-2026.

Then there's your electricity bill. Data centres now make up 40% of electricity demand growth in the UK, most of it clustered around London and the South East. Here's the kicker: most of that power is wasted. The average data centre uses only about 12-18% of the computing capacity it's built for. The rest sits idle - servers humming away, drawing electricity, generating heat, but doing nothing useful. It's like building a motorway and then only allowing traffic on one lane.

From April 2026, Ofgem is adding £30- £ 65 to the energy price cap solely to fund grid upgrades necessitated by data centre demand. The Iran conflict is making it worse by pushing oil past $110 a barrel, which drives up gas prices, which in turn drives up electricity costs, making running these data centres even more expensive. But Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren't absorbing those costs - they eventually land on your subscriptions, banks' operating costs, and the price of every digital service you use.

The real problem is there's no British alternative to keep them honest. The UK's only homegrown public sector cloud provider, UKCloud, went bust in 2022 - it couldn't compete once the American giants opened UK data centres and undercut them on price. Instead of fixing that, Starmer's government has doubled down, signing cloud contracts worth £14 billion through to 2030, some lasting eight years. In September 2025, the Ministry of Defence handed Google a £400 million "sovereign cloud" contract. A month later, HMRC's £500 million contract was awarded to Amazon as the sole bidder after rivals pulled out, citing unfair competition. Even HMRC has no choice but to pay whatever Amazon charges.

The technology to fix this already exists. A future government could change course. They could require a chunk of public sector cloud spending to go to British providers - the way we do with defence contracts. They could ban the long-term sweetheart deals that lock departments into single suppliers. Most importantly, they could back decentralised platforms that stitch together thousands of smaller providers, businesses, and even universities into a single shared network, instead of funnelling everything through American monopolies. This taps into power that already exists but remains unused.

Instead, Starmer's treating foreign data centres as a win - and UK households foot the bill - in energy costs, device prices, and subscriptions. A smarter government would ask why we're paying to waste British electricity when alternatives are already here.

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Jack Collier is Chief Growth Officer at io.net.

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