JEDI Contract to Have Only One Master

The US Department of Defense has confirmed that a massive cloud-computing contract potentially worth $10bn will be awarded to a single contractor.

Rumors had circulated that the lucrative Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract might be jointly awarded to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. However, a Pentagon spokesman said this morning that the award would not be split. 

In an email to news site Breaking Defense, public affairs officer Lt. Col. Robert Carver wrote: "DoD will not ‘split the award,’ as the requirement remains for a single award and the solicitation calls for a single award.”

Under the JEDI contract, the DoD would consolidate most of its more than 500 cloud contracts into a single general-purpose pathfinder contract. The planned change would allow the department to implement high-speed, AI-assisted Multi-Domain Operations and take advantage of emerging technologies. 

The JEDI mega-contract was awarded to Microsoft on October 25, 2019. However, in February 2020, a federal judge in Washington ordered the company to halt all work on the project after rival contractor Amazon put forward a legal challenge over how the contract was awarded.

In the challenge, Amazon has suggested that a feud between the company's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, and American president Donald Trump resulted in Microsoft's winning the contract. Amazon had been considered a front-runner to receive the contract after building cloud services for the Central Intelligence Agency. 

In a sealed opinion, Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the Court of F ..

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