AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Microsoft was officially awarded a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon on Friday - marking a big victory over Amazon, which was thought to be the frontrunner for the deal.
This contract, called the Joint
Previously, President Donald Trump reportedly wanted to "scuttle" the bidding process for JEDI. Trump had demanded more information about JEDI after hearing about complaints on the bidding process, and he promised to look into the deal after receiving letters on the matter from lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio.
Industry analysts predicted that Amazon Web Services was the frontrunner to win the contract, although others have said that Microsoft Azure has grown quickly as well and invested significant resources in improving its government cloud.
"We're surprised about this conclusion," an AWS spokesperson said. "AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion. We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure."
Although analysts saw the bid as a two-horse race, the competition was still fierce, to the point that even an anti-Amazon smear campaign spread around Washington, D.C.
Oracle and IBM also filed official protests about the contract, and Oracle filed a lawsuit saying that Amazon was favored to win JEDI and had conflicts of interest in the process.
Missing from the bid is Google, which dropped out of the bid last October.
Business Insider has reached out to Amazon, Microsoft, and the Department of Defense for comment.
