The Pentagon Scrubs a Cloud Deal and Looks to Add More AI

Late in 2019, the Pentagon chose Microsoft for a $10 billion contract called JEDI that aimed to use the cloud to modernize US military computing infrastructure. Tuesday, the agency ripped up that deal. The Pentagon said it will start over with a new contract that will seek technology from both Amazon and Microsoft, and that offers better support to data-intensive projects, such as enhancing military decisionmaking with artificial intelligence.

The new contract will be called the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. It attempts to dodge a legal and political mess that had formed around JEDI. Microsoft competitors Amazon and Oracle both claimed in lawsuits that the award process had been skewed. In April, the Court of Federal Claims declined to dismiss Amazon’s suit alleging that bias against the company from President Trump and other officials had nudged the Pentagon to favor Microsoft, creating the potential for years of litigation.

The Pentagon announcement posted Tuesday didn’t mention JEDI’s legal troubles but said the US military’s technical needs had evolved since it first asked for bids on the original contract in 2018. JEDI included support for AI projects, but the Pentagon’s acting chief information officer, John Sherman, said in a statement that the department’s need for algorithm-heavy infrastructure had grown still further.