The United States government is to support the development of a Sovereign Government Cloud and national computing infrastructure in Sri Lanka, with the Australian cybersecurity firm CyberCX named as the implementing partner for a proposed grant programme.
The commitment emerged from a preliminary discussion at the Ministry of Digital Economy, Hiru News reported. The stated aim is to strengthen the country’s digital transformation.
Who was in the room
The meeting brought together representatives of the Ministry of Digital Economy, GovTech Sri Lanka, the US Embassy in Sri Lanka and CyberCX Australia.
Eranga Weeraratne, Deputy Minister of Digital Economy, welcomed the support and stressed the strategic importance of expanding national artificial intelligence computing capability and building a secure digital infrastructure system.
Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya, the President’s Chief Advisor on the Digital Economy and chairman of GovTech Sri Lanka, set out the preliminary discussions already held with investors for data centres, and explained the requirements for the state cloud.
Shevan Gunatilaka, Chief Executive of GovTech Sri Lanka, said the agency would work closely with CyberCX and the relevant state institutions to design the proposed grant programme.
Evan Fowler, representing the US Embassy, said CyberCX has been selected as the implementing partner for the programme.
The meeting was nine days ago
The discussion took place on 2 November 2026. Hiru filed its account on 11 November — nine days later.
The filing is fresh and the event is real, but readers should note the gap: this is a report of a meeting held at the start of the month, not of something that happened on Wednesday. Nothing in the filing indicates what prompted it to be published now, and no intervening development is mentioned.
Where this fits
Sri Lanka’s state cloud has been moving through procurement and policy for most of this year. This desk has reported the President’s push to restructure digital transformation around GovTech institutions, Wijayasuriya’s own argument that the country’s data centre gap is a market failure, the GovTech marketplace approval, the winding down of ICTA into GovTech and the Digital Economy Authority, and the debate over data sovereignty, AI literacy and the PDPA.
It also arrives alongside a competing offer: in October, this desk reported a Chinese-backed sovereign AI computing centre proposal. The filing does not mention it, and does not say how — or whether — the two relate.
Not reported
The filing gives no figure for the US grant, no timeline, and no description of what the money would actually buy. It does not say whether the programme has been approved on the American side, what agency would fund it, or whether any agreement has been signed.
It does not explain why an Australian firm is the implementing partner for an American grant, how CyberCX was selected, or whether that selection went through a procurement process. It does not name the data centre investors Wijayasuriya referred to, state where a sovereign cloud would be physically hosted, or address who would hold the data and under what law.
No American official above embassy level is quoted, and there is no comment from the Ministry of Digital Economy’s minister.
A note on sourcing. Only Hiru News among the verified newsrooms had filed on this meeting when this article was first published. A search at that time found matching accounts on lankacnews.com and themorningtelegraph.com, neither of which is a verified newsroom for this site’s purposes — their agreement with Hiru indicates a shared official readout rather than independent corroboration. The underlying document appears to be a Ministry of Digital Economy statement; no outlet reports sending a reporter.
Hiru’s accompanying photograph of the meeting carries the newsroom’s watermark and has not been reproduced here.
Update — 12 November 2026
NewsFirst has now filed its own English account of the same meeting, correcting the single-source position recorded above. It confirms the participants, the selection of CyberCX as implementation partner, and the attributions to Eranga Weeraratne, Dr Hans Wijayasuriya, Shevan Gunatilake and the embassy’s Evan Fowler. NewsFirst spells the GovTech chief executive’s name Gunatilake where Hiru’s account gave Gunatilaka.
The NewsFirst filing adds detail absent from Hiru’s: the discussions also covered implementation of the Personal Data Protection Act, international cyber security standards, Sri Lanka’s evolving cyber security landscape, and planned upgrades to the Lanka Government Cloud platform. On artificial intelligence, participants discussed developing AI tools for public services and multilingual language models capable of operating in Sinhala and the country’s other languages.
NewsFirst describes the US assistance as anticipated and the programme as proposed, which matches Hiru’s framing. The questions listed above — the grant’s size, its approval status on the American side, and how an Australian firm came to implement an American programme — remain unanswered in both accounts.
