Microsoft nicks $10bn JEDI Department of Defense cloud contract from AWS

Amazon 'surprised' to lose out to Microsoft in monolithic military cloud contract

Microsoft has emerged as the winner of a $10 billion tender for a US Department of Defense cloud contract, beating out Amazon, IBM and Oracle in the process.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) had been the favourite for the massive 10-year contract for cloud services, which also saw IBM and Oracle eliminated earlier this year.

Oracle subsequently sued, claiming a ‘conflict of interest', suggesting that the tender had been engineered to favour the biggest cloud computing providers.

But Judge Eric Bruggink ruled that there was no evidence to prove any sort of bias in the procurement process for the JEDI contract, and added that Oracle had also failed to demonstrate any conflict of interest.

Google also criticised the single-vendor approach, but pulled out early on following staff protests over the company working with the US military.

At the time, the company claimed that it "couldn't be assured that it would align with our AI principles" and added that, in any case, parts of the contract "were out of scope with our current government certifications… Had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it."

JEDI, which stands for Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure, is a complete contract for the entire US defence operation from word processing through to artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. It was expected to be awarded in the summer, but was held up after President Trump questioned the fairness of the process, implying that it had been bent in Amazon's favour.

"I'm getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon... They're saying it wasn't competitively bid," Trump said in July. He continued: "Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it... I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what's going on."

Microsoft had already signed up the US Army to provide HoloLens headsets to be used for training soldiers in the relatively safe confines of virtual reality. While some staff protested over this contract, CEO Satya Nadella took a firmer line with employees than Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Amazon, meanwhile, expressed surprise over losing out to Microsoft. In a statement, the company claimed: "We're 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."