The Pentagon canceled the $10 billion cloud-infrastructure contract Microsoft and Amazon were fighting over, the agency announced on Tuesday.
The Department of Defense granted Microsoft the massive contract in 2019. Amazon soon after challenged the grant, claiming former President Trump had improperly influenced the award process due to his numerous public criticisms of the company.
The Pentagon stated in a release the agency called off the contract due to "evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances." CNBC first reported the announcement.
The 10-year JEDI — or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) — contract would have helped the Department of Defense move sensitive data to the cloud.
"JEDI was developed at a time when the Department's needs were different and both the CSPs technology and our cloud conversancy was less mature," John Sherman, chief information officer of the Department of Defense, stated.
Microsoft "respects" the Department of Defense's decision to scrap the contract instead of continue a potentially "years-long litigation battle," the company said in a release sent on Tuesday.
"We support them and every military member who needs the mission-critical 21th century technology JEDI would have provided," Microsoft stated.
The agency also announced it would accept proposals from Microsoft and Amazon for a new cloud-computing contract, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability.
Experts previously told Insider's Rosalie Chan Jeff Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post, which published critical coverage of the Trump administration, may have worked against Amazon Web Services in the JEDI contract bidding process. Industry analysts had speculated AWS would be the frontrunner for the contract.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
