Summary
- Norwegian Customs is seeking market input on future data-centre service models before launching a procurement.
- The agency estimates annual spending of up to NOK30m–40m and a potential total agreement value of NOK100m–200m.
- The live procurement portal sets a 23 September 2026 response deadline for the market dialogue.
Norwegian Customs has opened a market dialogue with data-centre service providers as it prepares a future procurement that could be worth up to NOK30m–40m annually.
Norwegian Customs, or Tolletaten, is asking suppliers for input on delivery models and service structures that could support its future data-centre requirements. Depending on the eventual contract duration, the agency estimates a total agreement scope of between NOK100m and NOK200m.
The process is an RFI rather than a final tender. It is intended to give the authority a clearer view of the available market before it decides how the service should be specified and competed.
The live procurement portal lists a response deadline of 23 September 2026 at 12:00 CET. That differs from the later October date shown by at least one tender aggregator, so the primary procurement portal should be treated as authoritative for the current timetable.
The RFI covers data-centre services rather than simply a one-off equipment purchase. Norwegian Customs says it wants insight into delivery models that can support the organisation’s operational requirements and provide a basis for the eventual procurement.
The agency’s IT environment supports systems used across customs operations, where availability and continuity have direct operational consequences. Norwegian Customs has previously described a sourcing strategy under which it retains responsibility for operating and managing its ICT portfolio, including core systems and end-user infrastructure.
Agency reviews a broader infrastructure model
The latest exercise follows an earlier 2026 market survey covering equipment, systems, maintenance, and expertise across servers, storage, networks, and related IT infrastructure. That earlier process also estimated annual procurement at NOK30m–40m and a potential combined value of NOK100m–200m.
Taken together, the exercises indicate that Norwegian Customs is examining both the physical and service layers beneath its computing environment rather than treating data-centre capacity as an isolated hosting decision.
Public-sector infrastructure contracts increasingly sit between traditional owned IT, colocation, managed services, and cloud. The balance determines who controls hardware, operational processes, security, resilience, maintenance, capacity planning, and the migration of workloads over the life of a contract.
Norwegian Customs has said its cloud vision retains internal responsibility for the operation and management of services and applications, while acknowledging that its sourcing strategy could change during a future agreement period. That leaves suppliers being asked to support an environment in which responsibility may be distributed across customer-operated systems, external infrastructure, and cloud platforms.
For data-centre providers, the procurement will therefore turn on more than space and power. Public authorities can require strong controls around data location, operational resilience, access, incident management, service continuity, and the ability to integrate infrastructure with existing networks and systems.
Norwegian Customs says external suppliers are already used for parts of its IT operations and maintenance and that infrastructure and data are located within the EU/EEA or jurisdictions recognised as providing adequate protection. Those requirements create a clear geographic and compliance boundary around future services.
The RFI does not commit the authority to a specific architecture or supplier model. Its purpose is to test what the market can provide before a competition is designed, allowing the agency to refine technical requirements, commercial structure, and division of operational responsibilities.
The response deadline gives suppliers a relatively short window to influence that structure. The more important milestone will come after the dialogue, when Norwegian Customs converts the information into a formal procurement and sets the final requirements for resilience, location, service levels, infrastructure ownership, and contract length.
