Microsoft wins the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract from the Pentagon -

The Microsoft has been awarded a massive 10 billion dollars worth of a contract by the US government. The news has been confirmed by the US Department of Defense. The name of the contract is JEDI contract which stand for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure.

Under this contract, Microsoft will provide the Pentagon with the cloud service for the basic storage as well as the power for the processing of artificial intelligence machine learning. In addition to this, the contract will allow the Pentagon to have the ability of processing the workload for mission critical scenarios.

This is the key contract to be won by Microsoft as the Amazon is already the dominant entity in the cloud computing. This is the reason there was a huge struggle between both Amazon and Microsoft for a long time as to who will win this contract.

Two other companies in the bidding war, Oracle and IBM were eliminated by the DoD back in the April and leaving only Amazon and Microsoft to be the companies with the requirements set by the Pentagon. This JEDI contract has been a real controversial one throughout the bidding war as Oracle lost the legal challenge for their claim of the contract having conflict of interests.

During the bidding process, even the President of Untied States, Donald Trump was involved. He said that the government was now taking a look at the JEDI contract after receiving numerous complaints from other competitors against Amazon and Microsoft.

As for Trump himself, he has been a long time critic of Jeff Bezos and his multibillion dollars company Amazon due to their tax arrangements.

Despite the contract being viable for the next decade, this is still a big win for the Microsoft but its employees are not agreeable to this contract. Thousands of the Google employees had protested against the involvement of the company with the Pentagon’s AI pathfinder program which is known by the name Project Maven. This led to Google ultimately backing down from the final process of the bidding for the JEDI Contract.

The employees of the Microsoft have also called up on the company’s top brass to drop the US Army’s HoloLens contract. This contract might eventually provide the army with 100000 of the augmented reality headsets to be used for the combat as well as training of the military.

As for Microsoft, they are still horning this particular contract and the US Army is already suing the HoloLens 2 modified headsets provided by Microsoft for training its soldiers.