US government awards $10 billion NSA cloud contract to Amazon
Ray Coleman
27 May 2022
After months of evaluation, the National Security Agency of the United States decided in April to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Amazon Web Services (AWS), over an outcry from rival tech giant Microsoft.
Known as “Wild and Stormy,” the contract is not the same as the much reported and similarly priced $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract from the Department of Defense that was also the subject of competing bids from AWS and Microsoft.
That contract was scrapped in July 2021 by the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden after years of squabbling between the two contenders, in the wake of the DoD’s decision under then-President Donald Trump to award the bid to Microsoft, a transparent effort to punish Amazon and its then CEO Jeff Bezos.
Although the NSA originally awarded the Wild and Stormy cloud contract to AWS in the summer of 2021, a challenge from Microsoft led the Government Accountability Office to direct the agency last October to reevaluate contract proposals from both bidders. The NSA ultimately went with the original AWS bid.
Commenting on the 10-year federal contract, an NSA spokesperson told Federal News Network the Wild and Stormy contract “is a continuation of NSA’s Hybrid Compute Initiative to modernize and address the robust processing and analytical requirements of the agency.” Microsoft has said it will not challenge the decision.