Pentagon awards multibillion-dollar cloud contract to Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle

By Brian Fung, CNN

The Defense Department has named Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle as the winners of a multibillion-dollar cloud computing contract whose predecessor the Pentagon had to cancel amid Amazon’s allegations that then-President Donald Trump had interfered in the award process.

The contracts announced Wednesday evening for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) call for providing the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

The multiple winners are eligible to receive a combined total of up to $9 billion under the program. The Pentagon is expected to hold a press conference on the JWCC award Thursday afternoon.

The Pentagon’s multi-vendor approach diverges from its prior cloud contracting effort, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which focused on procuring a single cloud vendor for the entire military.

The JEDI contract was initially awarded to Microsoft in 2019, a deal potentially worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. But it quickly became bogged down in a legal battle after Amazon alleged Trump “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” against the company in an effort to undermine its contracting bid and to hurt then-CEO Jeff Bezos, “his perceived political enemy,” because of his ownership of The Washington Post.

In 2020, the Pentagon said it wanted to re-evaluate its decision to award Microsoft the deal. And it formally canceled the JEDI contract last year, starting over with a new solicitation under the JWCC.

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