Pentagon awards $10 billion cloud deal to Microsoft, snubbing Amazon

SAN FRANCISCO: The Pentagon said it is awarding a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft, following a highly scrutinized bidding process which Amazon had been favored to win. The 10-year contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program, better known as JEDI, ultimately will see all military branches sharing information in a system boosted by artificial intelligence.

“The National Defense Strategy dictates that we must improve the speed and effectiveness with which we develop and deploy modernized technical capabilities to our women and men in uniform,” Defense Department Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said in a release. “This award is an important step in execution of the Digital Modernization Strategy.” Amazon was considered the lead contender to provide technology for JEDI, with its Amazon Web Services dominating the cloud computing arena and the company already providing classified servers for other government outfits including the CIA. But the Pentagon earlier this year delayed awarding the hefty contract, saying the process would be reviewed by newly appointed Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Esper was selected by US President Donald Trump, who has lashed out at Amazon and company founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. In July, Trump said he had heard “complaining from different companies like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM” over the JEDI bidding process.

“We’re going to take a look at it. We’ll take a very strong look at it,” he said, raising concerns among observers that the process would be improperly influenced. Amazon said late Friday it was “surprised about this conclusion.” “AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion,” the company said in a statement. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.

The contract has caused controversy over whether internet giants who say they want to make the world better should be involved in the defense industry. JEDI critics have likened it to the nefarious “Skynet” computing overlord in “Terminator” films. Microsoft was Amazon’s only rival in the final bidding for the winnertake-all contract, despite employees urging it to drop out. “Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war,” company staffers wrote in an anonymous op-ed posted a year ago on Medium, which said it had verified the authenticity of the piece. —AFP