Trump Hands Amazon a Curveball Loss
The Trump administration tossed a curveball Friday at Amazon and awarded a $10 billion cloud contract the company was expecting to land to one of the tech titan’s biggest competitors, Microsoft.
Amazon had long been considered a front-runner for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The decision came after President Donald Trump, a critic of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, instructed the Department of Defense in August to put the contract on hold.
“This contract will address critical and urgent unmet warfighter requirements for modern cloud infrastructure at all three classification levels delivered out to the tactical edge,” the DOD noted in a statement Friday after the announcement. Amazon said it was surprised at the result, which took months to happen.
“AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly led to a different conclusion,” Drew Herdener, a spokesman for the company, told reporters. Amazon will continue to be at the forefront of battle-readiness, he added.
Trump’s past criticism of Amazon will give Amazon grounds to protest the award, according to Price Floyd, a former head of public affairs at the Pentagon who consulted for Amazon. “He’s the commander-in-chief, and he hasn’t been subtle about his hostility toward Amazon,” Floyd told reporters. (Read more from “Trump Hands Amazon a Curveball Loss” HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE
