Amazon.com Inc claims the Pentagon failed to fairly judge its bid for a cloud contract worth up to US$10 billion because President Donald Trump viewed company founder Jeffrey Bezos as his “political enemy.”
Amazon Web Services claimed in a lawsuit that was made public on Monday that the Defense Department ignored Amazon’s superior technology and awarded the contract to Microsoft Corp. despite its “key failures” to comply with requirements for the so-called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract.
The Pentagon made those errors because of improper interference by Trump, who Amazon said “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy -- Jeffrey P. Bezos,” who the president has long criticized for his ownership of The Washington Post, according to the lawsuit.
Amazon filed a lawsuit under seal with the court last month to formally protest its loss of the cloud contract. The Pentagon’s JEDI cloud project is designed to consolidate the department’s cloud computing infrastructure and modernize its technology systems. The contract is worth as much as $10 billion over 10 years and could offer the winner a bigger foothold in the burgeoning federal cloud market.
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