Microsoft was awarded a hotly contested contract valued at as much as $10 billion to provide cloud computing services to the Pentagon, the Defense Department said in a statement on Friday night.
The decision deals a blow to market leader Amazon.com, which had been battling for the 10-year contract and was seen by many industry analysts as the likely winner. Oracle was another contender.
The Pentagon has said the cloud project, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, is intended to help bring the Pentagon’s technology into the modern era.
The Defense Department is investing in commercial cloud services, which host computing power and storage in remote data centers, to improve data security and speed up real-time sharing of information across the military.
The Pentagon said the contract was expected to be completed by 2029.
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