Tired of Microsoft and Amazon’s Bickering, Pentagon Cancels $10 Billion JEDI Contract

JEDI is formally useless, people. At least, for now, it’s useless.

The contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure challenge—an expansive, $10 billion effort to assist overhaul and modernize the Pentagon’s IT operations—has been canceled, officers with the military agency told media outlets on Tuesday.

JEDI, which might’ve concerned the migration of large quantities of DoD information to a business cloud system, had been the topic of intense company competitors, lawsuits, and delays for years.

“With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps,” stated a DOD spokesperson, in a press release shared with the media.

The contract, which might have assured IT work with the Pentagon for over a decade, was first conceptualized back in 2017 and was initially the thing of an intense bidding battle between among the world’s greatest tech corporations—together with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and others. The discipline of contenders finally narrowed to simply Microsoft and Amazon, with the latter seeming (for a time) to be likely to win the contract.

However, in 2019 the DoD introduced it had awarded JEDI to Microsoft—a outcome that Amazon didn’t take significantly effectively. The firm published a diatribe against the decision, accusing the award of being politically motivated and unduly influenced by then President Donald Trump (who apparently hates Jeff Bezos). The firm subsequently filed a lawsuit on the premise of that argument.

G/O Media might get a fee

Now, it might seem, all of that drama was for naught.

It appears that every one the combating and lawsuits have led to the JEDI plan turning into outdated, a DOD spokesperson informed reporters that “with the shifting technology environment,” the contract “no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps.” While JEDI could also be useless, the Pentagon concurrently introduced a brand new cloud initiative on Tuesday—the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC, described by Defense One as “a multi-cloud, multi-vendor indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract” that’s particularly calling for bids from Microsoft and Amazon, as they’re apparently the one corporations with substantial sufficient assets to fulfill the Pentagon’s wants.