Pentagon awards $10bn cloud computing deal to Microsoft

The Pentagon has awarded Microsoft a $10bn cloud computing contract, beating out favourite Amazon, whose competitive bid drew criticism from US president Donald Trump and its business rivals, The Guardian reported.

Bidding for the huge project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another.

The contracting process had long been mired in conflict of interest allegations, and drew the attention of Donald Trump, who has publicly taken swipes at Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. Trump in August said his administration was reviewing Amazon’s bid after complaints from other companies.

The contract is part of a broader digital modernisation of the Pentagon meant to make it more technologically agile. One goal is to give the military better access to data and the cloud from battlefields and other remote locations.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesman said the company was “surprised about this conclusion”.

The company said that a “detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings” would “clearly lead to a different conclusion,” according to the statement.

Amazon is considering options for protesting the award, a person familiar with the matter said.

Although the Pentagon boasts the world’s most potent fighting force, its information technology remains woefully inadequate, according to many officials.

Officials have complained of having outdated computer systems and being unable to access files or share information as quickly as they might be able to in the private sector.

“If I am a warfighter, I want as much data as you could possibly give me,” lieutenant general Jack Shanahan, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters in August describing the importance of the contract.