Pentagon awards Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle $9B cloud contract

WASHINGTON — Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services will each share a piece of the Defense Department’s $9 billion contract to build out its key military cloud computing backbone, the Pentagon announced today after delaying the awards earlier this year.

The companies were awarded a contract for the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), which is meant to provide DoD “with enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” according to today’s announcement. 

JWCC is a multi-vendor, multi-cloud follow up to the infamous single-source Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, which was worth up to $10 billion and canceled in 2021 after a lengthy legal battle.

Contracts for JWCC were initially expected to be awarded in April, but after receiving proposals, DoD decided to delay the award to take a longer look at the offerings. Last November, DoD issued solicitations to all four Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon.

According to today’s announcement, funds will be obligated on individual orders as they are issued and the estimated completion date is June 8, 2028. The aim is to meet specific capability gaps spanning all classification levels — unclassified, secret and top secret.

Sharon Woods, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, laid out the timeline in November for the classification levels:

“So the timeline of the contract is that the unclassified environment will be available 30 days after contract award, secret is 60 days out per contract award, and then top secret is 180 days after contract award,” Woods said. “Each of the vendors are in different levels of maturity, and so some vendors need to deliver more quickly than others. But those are the requirements under the contract.”