E-commerce behemoth Amazon is reportedly set to ask a US judge to temporarily block Microsoft from working on the $10 billion cloud contract called JEDI from the Pentagon.
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract is a large US Department of Defense cloud computing venture reportedly worth $10 billion, and has been in the works for the last two years. Before Microsoft won it in 2019, companies like IBM, Google, Amazon had made offers for the same.
However, JEDI had invoked huge criticism from every corner of the world. More notably, Google had pulled out their candidacy after its employees outburst on the bid to assist the government in developing lethal warfare technologies.
After Microsoft won the coveted deal, the contract invoked ire among other organisations and industry experts, as almost everyone had envisioned that Amazon would be the sole winner. Most of them felt that Amazon was the front runner due to its superior security and services. Many had questioned the underlying factors which led Microsoft to win the race. The move by US President Donald Trump had also raised eyebrows and evoked whispered allegations of lobbying and suspicions regarding quid pro quo deals.
In fact, a noted British financial newspaper had said at the time that the Microsoft deal was a direct effect of the alleged tension between President Trump and his hostility towards Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post media group. This had taken a legal dimension in November with a court filing in which Amazon claimed “flaws” in the procurement process powered by the President’s “personal vendetta”.
Amazon had said in November court filing, “These errors . . . were not merely the result of arbitrary and capricious decision making… President Trump launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy.”
