Microsoft is challenging $10 billion government contract between NSA and Amazon

Microsoft is challenging a government contract that Amazon Web Services won with the US intelligence agency NSA. The contract is to support the intelligence agency’s cloud infrastructure and would generate $10 billion for AWS.

The exact details of the government contract are not known, but according to website Nextgov, the appointment of Amazon Web Services has to do with the US National Security Agency’s plans to move its data infrastructure further to a cloud environment.

Microsoft disagrees with the NSA’s decision to choose AWS, according to Nextgov. At the end of last month, the company filed an administrative protest with the Government Accountability Office. “Based on the NSA’s decision, we are filing an administrative protest. We hereby exercise our rights and will do so in a responsible and respectful manner,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Nextgov.

It’s not the first time Amazon and Microsoft have battled over a government contract and contested its award to the other party. In the fall of 2019, the US Department of Defense gave the cloud contract for the JEDI project to Microsoft. The JEDI project, or the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud, is intended, among other things, to give the US military better access to defense data on battlefields and other remote areas. Amazon challenged the assignment to Microsoft last year and was right in a US court. The preparatory work had to be stopped for this. At the beginning of last month, the project was finally halted because the Pentagon prefers a new ‘multi-vendor’ contract.