Pentagon quietly re-awarded its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contracts to U.S. tech giants
Indefinite Delivery Contracts signed on February 16th with each of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle became public this morning.
The Pentagon has had more than five years of setbacks in its attempt to set up a potentially $10 billion commercial cloud computing program with four major American tech giants (Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google). The first major program — named the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) as part of a requisite hat tip to Star Wars — was initially awarded to Microsoft and then cancelled in July 2021 after years of legal challenges and clandestine opposition research from Oracle and Amazon.
The replacement for JEDI, the awkwardly named Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), learned to mitigate corporate in-fighting by avoiding the original winner-take-all approach and instead jointly awarded the multi-billion dollar contract to all four companies in December. The initial awards only came with $100,000 minimum guaranteed payouts, with each company needing to continually compete for chunks of the $9 billion ceiling. Of the four tech companies, Oracle had surprisingly received the largest payout so far — just over $4.3 million — whereas Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have respectively received $3.5 million, $814,800, and literally $0.
Between January 20th and 25th, the initial $100,000 minimum payouts for each of the four companies were reversed and then — due to a 90 day reporting delay — it became public this morning that on February 16th each of the four companies was re-awarded a $9 billion ceiling JWCC contract. (And the author filed Freedom of Information requests for each this morning.)
Given that Amazon had been the initial favorite for JEDI due to its long history of cloud contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency and that public records suggest the company has so far been left out of JWCC obligations, as well as the minimum payout reversals and the newly public contract reawards, it appears that the contracting process has continued to be a major obstacle for the Pentagon. Due to the lack of transparency surrounding the U.S. Intelligence Community’s similar Commercial Cloud Environment (C2E) contract — reportedly with the same four companies plus IBM — it is unclear if the classified cloud has been similarly encumbered. Microsoft’s bid protest of the National Security Agency’s $10 billion ceiling WildandStormy contract remains the most detailed window into that world.